This year, my two oldest sons asked me to sign them up for piano lessons. For reasons that a therapist might be better placed to untangle, I decided it would also be a good time for me to take up the piano again, after 30 years.

“Man hands on misery to man,” Philip Larkin wrote in his chirpy-desolate poem This Be The Verse. In our house, this transfer now happens with predictable efficiency on Monday afternoons between after-school pickup and dinner.