Oh, how very nice it is to have a piano around the house. All weekend long, I've been taking those odd five- or ten-minute bits of time (when the oven is heating up, while tea brews, when the postman is coming up the street but he's still too far away for me to run out to the box) and playing one or two of the little pieces I have.

Yes. Practicing is much easier and more fun than it was when I was 13. Why should that be, I wonder? A simple matter of maturity? The fact that once you've lived through filling out your own tax forms and making your own dental appointments and gone off to work five and sometimes six days out of the week, it doesn't seem like a burden to sit down and make music? I don't know. I do know it IS a lot of fun.

One of the pieces I have for this week is an arrangement of "Turkey in the Straw," which is very close (if not the very same tune) as (what I learned as a child as) "Do your ears hang low" (which was actually originally dedicated to a very different body part, by the WWI era soldiers singing it) and which is also available online in a version about, um, "mature" chesticles at Groovin' Granny (Warning: popups. And it also plays pretty automatically on opening, so if you are at work and have particularly draconian sorts around you, you may not want to click. It's probably SFW, but it does contain the word "boobs" and the phrase "son of a monkey-spank")

So of course, "do your boobs hang low" runs in my mind as I play the piece. (Probably a vestige of the 13-year-old in me; I was also singing, "Be kind to your webfooted friends" under my breath the week I was practicing a highly-arranged version of The Stars and Stripes).

I will say about that Groovin' Granny site: that is on my short list of things that will reliably make me laugh when I am in a bad mood.

But in addition to the Turkey in the straw/ Ears or other anatomical bits hanging low, and a truly dreadful and hateful to me piece called "Holiday Fanfare" (not a scrap of melody to be found in the damn thing; it is mainly an exercise to teach crossed-hand technique and I will be heartily glad to be done with it), I AM learning my first "real" (as in not-arranged-to-be-simpler) piece of music.

It is Beethoven's Ecossaise in G. Which I was really impressed and excited by when the music teacher gave it to me. And then, later, I looked it up online and found a video of a five year old playing it.

Pride, meet fall.

But then again, you can look at anything more than one way, and I've chosen to look at it like this: if a five year old can play the piece with their tiny little five year old hands, that means I should have no problem mastering the tricky left-hand octaval jumps in the second part of the piece. (Which she did not tell me to work on yet, but did not expressly FORBID me from trying, so of course I've tried it out).

I can't play it fantastically well yet - I can manage a slow and at times halting rendition of the first section - but I am much better even this morning than I was Friday night when I got the piece.

There is something I find powerfully motivating in that - being able to hear the small steady improvement in my ability to play something. To be able to go, over the course of a week or so, from not being able to play something at all, to being able to play it mostly mistake-free and even with the beginnings of some style.

I don't remember that when I was 13. Maybe I was just blind to it and years of education and grad school and working have trained me to look for, and to be grateful for, the tiny bits of improvement. (Or maybe I'm just a quicker study now than when I was 13, I don't know).

Though I will say - the piece is pretty much exactly the sort of thing I jumped into the whole piano world for - being able to play some of the "small" simple pieces, the things you don't generally hear in the symphonic repertoire, stuff that was originally written for keyboard (rather than something arranged back for it). There's a certain joy in being able to make the piece come alive for the few minutes that you are playing it. I already have most of the first part memorized - that is another thing I do not remember from my first go-round, how easily memorization comes to me - and I like the idea of getting a bunch of pieces off by heart, and running through them now and again just to make sure they're still there, but to have a small music library in my head, so I could sit down at a piano anywhere, whether or not I had music, and just play something.