Nothing gold can stay, except the dog’s pee on my sheet music, which I copied from an heirloom of a book my piano teacher let me borrow–Tchaikovsky or Chopin perhaps, maybe Grieg. She was Russian and Orthodox and cooked mayonnaise with her grandson. She wore an auburn wig and never let you see her wrists. Her father would sit in his chair, still as a corpse, until you’d finished playing, then he’d speak Russian, knowing you knew no Russian, to tell you your staccatos weren’t sharp enough and your fortes weren’t even loud enough to wake the dog, which laid at his feet, not the dog that peed on my sheet music–this was a big dog, named Silver like the medal my dad’s high school basketball team won for losing in the championship. This dog was a serious dog, the type to chase the mailman in a cartoon. This dog didn’t watch cartoons, only ​Cops ​and ​Jeopardy ​like my Paw would while a roach moseyed behind him to the tune of the show’s theme song.