Instrumental

October 22, 2026

When my daughter Madison was 9, she decided she wanted to be a piano for Halloween. Not a pianist, a piano. I quickly realized that neither the costume aisle nor a 9-year-old’s construction skills would suffice.

We parents want our kids’ dreams to come true so much that it’s tempting to leap in and make them happen as soon as we hear about them. But we also want our kids to grow into people who can build the lives they imagine, which means lovingly and artfully leaving room for awkward attempts along the way. It can be anguishing to watch someone you adore struggle with something you could do in thirty seconds. But the struggle time you gift them can be exactly when they discover what they can do.

Fortunately for those of us with an itchy glue-gun finger, Halloween offers a lovely outlet for our impulse to take charge... as long as we’re invited. We get to brainstorm, experiment, and lend whatever skills they ask for, purely for the delight of it. Some dreams will exceed our abilities, or the available materials, but there’s still pleasure in taking them seriously together.

So I happily threw myself into turning Madison into a trick-or-treating piano. Our first attempt with separate cardboard panels failed; a flat-screen TV box proved more cooperative. We added paint, glued on sheet music, and secured a cloth runner to conceal the hole around Madison’s head. A phone and speakers tucked inside supplied the music. Doors opened on her sister Ella “playing” Rachmaninoff. They got a lot of candy that night.

I knew that Madison’s future would one day be hers alone to compose. But for this Halloween dream, she supplied the vision, I tackled the keyboard, and we were perfectly in tune.

—Debra Ross, publisher

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