Blind Pianist, 3, More Than a Chop Off the Old Stick

A blind 3-year-old’s piano playing is music to the ears of his parents, who were told by doctors at his birth that the child would be mentally retarded and hard of hearing. Jermaine Gardiner of Baltimore was born blind in his right eye, with an unformed left eye and other facial deformities. He has had three corneal transplants in an attempt to improve the vision in his right eye. But Jermaine played his first sonata on the piano at 13 months, mastered Beethoven a year later and at 3 composed his first song. “We feed him at the piano in the morning,” his mother, Jacqueline Kess-Gardiner, said. “When he gets home from school, he sits down at the piano. Sometimes we’ll wake up at night and he’ll be at the piano.” It started when Jermaine was 8 months old. His mother said she held him on her lap at the piano as she helped his older brother with his lessons. Minutes later, the baby played the same song his brother had been practicing, she said.

--April 15. Americans approach that deadline for filing income tax returns with a variety of emotions, University of Maryland researchers said. Some relish the tensions, Charles Edelson, an assistant professor of accounting at the College Park, Md., school said. “They enjoy the opportunity to push every provision of the tax law to the limits.” At the other extreme are those he calls the wimps, who, even if they are entitled to breaks and deductions, resist taking them. And Edelson says others are gripped by form anxiety and are unable to confront the paper work. Kathy P. Zamostny and Donald D. Mullison of the university’s Campus Counseling Center advise breaking the process into manageable sections and making clear in a partnership who is responsible for what. And they suggest putting tax time into perspective, as an annual rite of spring but not the end of the world.

--The sounds of battle mixed with the voices of merchants hawking souvenirs as 6,000 Civil War buffs re-enacted the first day of the Battle of Shiloh. Billed as the biggest Civil War remake, the event marked the 125th anniversary of the 1862 Tennessee battle in which Northern forces drove back the Confederates and more than 23,000 men were wounded or killed. Ken Chestman, an investment banker who spent two years organizing the re-creation on a field near the original battleground, said: “It’s history re-created so people can see and understand what happened 125 years ago. It’s awfully hard to smell black powder between the pages of a history book.”