The Route I Drive Three Times a Week, and the Small Things That Kept Falling Off the Dashboard

I teach piano in people's homes. This is not a glamorous way to earn a living, and nobody warns you when you start out that the real skill is not sight reading or scales but driving. I cover a loop that runs from Kenilworth up through the southern suburbs of Cape Town, across to a family in Rondebosch, then back down toward Muizenberg for my last two pupils of the afternoon. Three times a week I drive that loop. I have driven it in winter when the rain comes sideways off the mountain, and in February when the tar goes soft and the light lasts until eight.

For a long time I did all of this with my phone wedged against the gearstick, or lying face up on the passenger seat where I could not see it, or, on one memorable occasion, tucked into the little gap below the radio where it slid out at the first speed bump and vanished under the seat while a woman's calm voice told me to turn left in four hundred metres.

Why a piano teacher needs a map at all

People assume I know the roads by heart. I do, mostly. But the loop is not the problem. The problem is the extra lessons, the trial pupils, the mother who books a single Tuesday because her daughter wants to try before they buy an instrument, and who lives on a road I have never heard of behind a shopping centre I have driven past a thousand times without ever turning in.

Those are the drives that undo you. You are already late because the four o'clock pupil wanted to play his exam piece one more time and you did not have the heart to stop him. Now you are trying to find a house you have never seen, in the dark, in the rain, and your phone is somewhere near your left ankle.

I once arrived at a lesson so flustered from getting lost that the child played better than I taught. Her mother offered me tea and I sat there with my hands shaking, not from caffeine, but from twenty minutes of squinting at a screen I could not safely look at while moving.

The afternoon I nearly rear-ended a bakkie in Wynberg

It was the bakkie that changed my mind. I was crawling along in the after-school crush near Maynardville, phone flat on the seat, and I glanced down for exactly as long as it takes to read a street name. When I looked up the bakkie in front of me had stopped for a pedestrian and I had not. I stood on the brake so hard my folder of sheet music slid off the back seat and emptied itself into the footwell, Beethoven and a grade two exam syllabus everywhere.

Nothing hit anything. But I sat at the next red light with my heart going like a metronome set too fast, and I thought, very clearly, this is stupid. I am a grown woman risking a collision because I cannot be bothered to solve a problem I have known about for two years.

That weekend I finally went looking. Not for anything clever. Just something to hold the phone at eye level so I could glance at a map the way you glance at a rearview mirror, quickly and then away. I ended up scrolling through a South African shop's page of Car Phone Holders while my tea went cold, comparing the ones that clip into the air vent against the ones that suction onto the windscreen, reading the reviews from other people who had clearly also had their own bakkie moment.

The small object that changed the drive

I chose a vent mount in the end, because my windscreen catches the afternoon sun and I did not trust a suction cup in the Cape heat. It arrived in a padded envelope. It cost less than a single lesson. And the first Tuesday I used it, driving to a new pupil in a part of Plumstead I did not know, I understood how much stress I had simply accepted as the price of the job.

The phone sat there at the top of my sightline. The map was just there, in the corner of my vision, the way a passenger who knows the way might casually say, next left. I did not reach for anything. I did not look down. I arrived at the house calm, early even, and I taught a good lesson because I was not still shaking off a fright.

It is a very ordinary object and I feel slightly ridiculous writing three paragraphs about it. But anyone who spends their working life in a car will understand. The difference between fumbling and not fumbling, over a year, is enormous. It is the difference between arriving as a teacher and arriving as a wreck.

The other things that live in my car now

Once I had solved the mounting problem I started paying attention to the rest of the little ecosystem in my car, which I had also been neglecting. The phone that now sat so proudly at eye level was, of course, always flat by the time I reached Muizenberg, because running a map for three hours drinks the battery. So I finally replaced the frayed charging cord that had been living in my glovebox since roughly the invention of the smartphone, its rubber split and its connector so loose I had to prop it with a coin.

I am the sort of person who will use a broken thing for years rather than admit it is broken. When I finally sat down to order a proper new one, I went down a small rabbit hole of Cables trying to remember which end my phone actually took, because of course the industry had changed the plug on me at some point when I was not paying attention. I bought two, one for the car and one for the bag, so that I would never again be the woman teaching a lesson while her phone died in the car outside.

What the whole thing taught me, beyond the driving

There is a pupil of mine, a retired engineer, who took up piano at sixty-eight and practises more diligently than any child I teach. He told me once that half of engineering is just refusing to live with a problem you have decided is normal. The wobble in the machine, the noise in the pipe, the thing everybody has learned to work around. You look at it properly and you fix it, and then you cannot believe you lived with it so long.

That is exactly what happened to me with the car. For two years the near misses and the lost phone and the dead battery were simply the weather of my working life, unpleasant but unchangeable. And then in the space of one weekend and a few small parcels they were gone.

My newest indulgence, if you can call it that, is that I finally sorted out charging at home too. My phone spends its nights on one of the MagSafe Chargers on my bedside table, so it simply snaps on when I put it down and is full by morning, and I no longer start my Tuesday loop already at forty percent, already anxious, already behind. It is a stupidly small thing. It has made my mornings noticeably kinder.

I still teach piano in people's homes. I still drive the loop three times a week. But I arrive as myself now, hands steady, ready to sit beside a nervous seven year old and tell them, gently, that the left hand keeps time and the right hand sings. You cannot teach that well if you have just frightened yourself half to death at a robot in Wynberg. It turns out the most important instrument I own is the car, and I had been playing it badly for years.