Marylou.

This has already been a year of far too many final goodbyes, and this week, news came of another awful loss for the music world. One of my first violin teachers, and one of the very small circle of people who I credit with setting me on the firm and irrevocable path to becoming a musician, passed away quietly at her home in Boston this week. Marylou Speaker Churchill was the principal second violin of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 23 years (she played in the BSO for 30 years all told,) and that's quite something. But it's nothing compared to the legacy she left behind as the kind of teacher who truly changes lives every single day.

I was 9 years old - just one year into my time as the youngest and least advanced student in Marylou's studio - when she invited me to spend an entire week with her at Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the BSO. Tanglewood is the Shangri-La of classical music, a near-perfect campus of rolling lawns and concert halls, tucked away in the gorgeous Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. Music lovers from all over New England flock to Tanglewood every summer, and the best chamber musicians and soloists in the world consider Tanglewood an essential stop on their itineraries. When you attend a concert there, and lie back on the lawn outside the main shed, with the grass tickling your scalp and the sound of a Beethoven slow movement in your ears, you never want it to end.

And that summer when I was nine - pulling into the musicians-only parking lot every morning in the passenger seat of my teacher's ancient VW Beetle convertible; attending closed rehearsals in which real live Professional Musicians slogged their way through symphonies they'd played a hundred times, and made fun of the guest conductor behind his back; and playing Frisbee on the lawn with the BSO's new young concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe - I knew exactly what I wanted to do for a living.

Beyond possessing the simple generosity of spirit that could lead a teacher to present a hyperactive 9-year-old with such a gift, Marylou was the kind of teacher who demanded (and got) 100% effort from her students. Less than a year after I began taking lessons with her, she realized that I tended to practice hard for a day or two after each lesson, then get lazy and arrive at the next week's lesson dramatically underprepared. A lot of teachers just throw up their hands at that kind of student. Marylou's response was to offer to teach me twice a week, so that I never went more than three days without a lesson.

When my family moved away from Boston in 1986, I was devastated to be losing Marylou, and I suspect that the wonderful teacher who succeeded her as my primary mentor in Pennsylvania would tell you that my sulking over the move didn't make his job any easier. I saw her once more about a year later, when she happened to be in Philadelphia for a concert and gave me a lesson in her hotel room for old time's sake, and then, incredibly, I didn't see her for nearly 20 years. I kept tabs on her career, of course, and was overjoyed when I heard that she and her husband, Mark (who is one of the legends of Boston's incredible youth music scene) had decided to adopt twin girls back in the mid-1990s.

Those girls are now 12 years old, and in one of the not-quite-coincidences that makes the music world such a wonderful place to live, they have been attending the summer music camp I teach at for three years now. They're incredible kids, full of energy, talent, and kindness, and this past summer, thanks to them, I had the chance to come full circle in my relationship with Marylou.

As it happened, I was coaching one of the girls in a string quartet that I knew from the beginning had the potential to deliver a knockout performance that would stand in each of their memories. And on the night of the concert, I found myself (by total coincidence, I swear) sitting right next to proud mother Marylou, on the fringes of the packed concert barn. We exchanged pleasantries, as we had every recent summer, and I told her what a pleasure her daughter was to work with, just as I would to nearly any parent. And then, the group walked out to play the first movement of Dvorak's American quartet.

I'd love to say that the main thing I remember about their performance is how good it was. (And it was very, very good.) But the truth is that the image seared into my memory is of Marylou's daughter, Julia. She strode to her place before picking up her violin, and made a point of finding her mother in the crowd, and smiling broadly at her. She did the same thing again as soon as the performance ended and the crowd erupted in cheers. Marylou matched her, grin for grin.

As the applause finally died down, I turned to my old teacher, and said, "You know, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. Dozens of kids walk out to play concerts in this barn every summer, and they all make a concerted effort to look anywhere but at their parents." Marylou nodded, and smiled ever so slightly, and then said, "Children do these wonderful things. And they never have any idea just how much these little things mean to us."

If you ask me, that's a pretty good summation of what great teachers do, as well.