Back to lessons

I started the new term of piano lessons yesterday afternoon. (this makes what, the beginning of my third year at them?)

I'm still working on Hanon. I'm up to the so-called "transcendent" exercises (which makes me laugh a little - transcendence really doesn't describe how I feel the first 30 or so times I play one of them). I'm also working on a Kabalevsky piece - five themes on a Russian folksong or somesuch. It was "assigned" over break and I worked on it some (at least, during the time I was in my own house). My teacher said I had made good progress on it but you know, I can't quite "feel" Kalalevsky the way I can "feel" Bach. I think part of it is that I know and like Bach - have listened to his music since childhood - and I didn't even really know of the existence of Kabalevsky before I started piano.

(Even the Wikipedia page on him doesn't give me much of a feel for him - apparently he was well-liked by the Soviet leadership, he was big in music education, and his later works are sometimes described as "popular, bland, and successful." I suppose it's possible that there is more in common between Bach's worldview and mine than between Kabalevsky's and mine, and that's why I have a hard time feeling what he is trying to "say" with the piece I'm learning. But I do feel like I can't quite get inside the composer's head the way I can with some of the other stuff I've learned.)

I also concluded - to my teacher's satisfaction - the work on the theme from "Wachet Auf!" and now have started on an arrangement of Grieg's "Morning" (from Peer Gynt). I expect that this piece will be a not-very-many-weeks' work for me; I could pretty well play the arrangement through this morning with the first 20 minutes or so of trying it. (But sometimes it's kind of fun to have something you can master quickly).

One thing I am doing is going back and revisiting pieces I learned previously. I'm doing this partly to see my own progress - for example, reviving "Ecossaise in G," I realized that my fingers have become stronger and I'm much better at doing staccato notes "crisply" than I was back when I first learned it. But I'm also fond of the idea of having a memorized "repertoire" that I can pull out easily, either when I'm practicing and bored or having a hard time with what I'm trying to work on, or, on the off chance that either someone comes and visits me and wants to hear me play, or I'm somewhere where there's a piano and someone wants to hear me play.

Also, really, part of the reason I am learning piano is for the same reason that Madeline L'Engle talked about learning it: to be able to come home at the end of the day, and to be able to play a piece all the way through, with reasonable precision.

One of the things about learning anything - any new skill - is that there's a "hard part" and a "fun part." And you have to work through the hard part to get to the fun part. (Though if you're like me, sometimes the discipline and the progress of the "hard part" is kind of fun, too. Or at least rewarding.) And so, now that I can see that I'm approaching more of the "fun part" of being able to play the piano, I want to take advantage of it.

Dear old Bach

Finally, my piano teacher deemed me "expert enough" at the arrangement of the first part of Moonlight Sonata and moved me on to another piece. (I'm still working on "Hunting Song," though).

The new piece I've started on is an arrangement of one of the themelets from "Wachet auf," better known to Anglophones as "Sleepers awake"

I said before I didn't like Schumann much, after playing a couple of his pieces? Well, I've decided after learning a few Bach pieces that I love and respect Bach even more as a composer than I did before.

For one thing, his pieces have that beautiful logic to them. Things make sense to me in them. The chord progressions sound "right," like there is no other progression that would work better. (I'm noticing that with the left-hand arrangement for "Wachet Auf" - at least in the first part).

I once had a friend who disdained Bach, who claimed his music was "too mathematical" for them. I don't know about that - it was the precision and the order that I always loved so much. Maybe I'm excessively left-brained (to use a concept that's apparently recently been discredited), but I like that order.

Madeline L'Engle once wrote about "chaos vs. cosmos," where the idea was that some people tended to believe there was an underlying order to the universe, that somehow things would sort out right at the end, and artists who ascribed to that belief would present "cosmos" - sort of an ordered rightness, the idea that there is an underlying good. On the other hand, "chaos" was people who did not see those patterns, who did not believe (I may be over extending her ideas here) that there was an underlying Good to the universe, a Good that would eventually win out over Evil.

Bach had to have been someone who believed in cosmos. I don't mean just because he was involved in the church, because he directed choirs and wrote lots of sacred music; when I listen to his music I can *hear* that he believed there was an underlying order to the universe. And I love that, I find it tremendously comforting. Listening to Bach makes me feel better when I'm distressed.

So it makes me happy to have another piece of his to work on, one that's familiar but now that I see the music for it (and yes, it's an arrangement of just one of the themes, but still), it's like I can see the underlying structure of his "argument," so to speak, it's like I can see some of his reasoning (the chord progressions) and it makes sense.

It's kind of like, I don't know...having heard for years about some ecological theory, maybe even teaching it, and then finally seeing the data and data analysis that led up to the development of the theory. It's kind of like a peek behind the curtain.

Or it's like those rare moments where, for just a second, just a tiny second, I feel like I understand things, like the cosmology and God and everything kind of makes sense. (Of course I immediately forget it, and I maybe never actually "had" it, but for a moment I feel like I understand).

I will say I'm a bit disappointed (I ran through the entire right-hand part of the piece; I'm supposed to focus on the first dozen measures or so with both hands) that the section I'm working from doesn't go far enough to include the tune of "A Mighty Fortress is our God," which Bach worked into the cantata later on. That's one of my favorite hymns and it sounds so good as part of the cantata. (When the recording of it I have is playing, I sing along - even though I have to reach 'way down' because the setting is really too low for me - when that part comes along). I love the hymn both for the tune and for the words. (both written by Luther; part of the words are based on Psalm 46).

It's funny how sometimes your own feelings color the meaning. There's a line in there that is something like, "And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us," which I know really means that people are tempted to slide into depravity, I often hear it in a way that I think perhaps more reflects my own feelings and life: I "hear" the word "undo" as more like "be overwhelmed by," in the sense of, as when I watch the evening news and put my head in my hands, because there's so much cruelty in this world, and it's easy to give in to despair. Or something.

So anyway, even though (after 2 days' practice) I can only barely pick out the first dozen measures or so with both hands, it still pleases me to be playing it.

Wow, it's busy-time on campus. I've been slammed with stuff to do - grading, prep, research, all of that. I also have to find time this week to clean house and also do the last couple bits on the taxes (I forgot to claim the $500 I made reviewing textbooks, so I need to recalculate. And yes, I am worried enough about it being found out not to just go along and leave it off)

I have been doing some knitting - in fact, I knit a bit yesterday while invigilating an exam. This time it's the long-stalled Clapotis that I'm knitting out of Louisa Harding "Impression."

I had put the shawl aside, in part, because as I worked on the mid-section, I began to worry that I'd run out of yarn. That's actually my usual strategy when something starts bothering me about a project...if I'm afraid there's not enough yarn, or if it's a variegated yarn that's pooling funny, or there's possibly evidence of damage (insect or otherwise: I've learned through sad experience that carrying yarn in a zippered bag means that the yarn sometimes gets snagged).

It's not exactly a "I'm waiting to see if I should rip this back" kind of thing - I very rarely rip something back, unless it's a truly tragic problem (like, two skeins in a sweater that claimed to be the same dyelot, weren't). It's actually how I deal with a lot of problems that bug me: I am what they sometimes call "avoidant." I would rather not deal with a problem if I can put it off. (It's the one area of my life where I'm prone to procrastination).

It's not for nothing that I like the comment Linda Ligon made in her book ("This is how I go when I go like this"): How you do anything is how you do everything. I think that's true, of me at least. I can see how I react to certain things in my work-life being similar to how I react to similar instances while knitting or quilting, or where interacting with people outside of work. Or working on the piano.

Yes, I am still taking piano lessons, though I've not talked about it much. I'm getting close to proficient on Clementi's "Sonatina in C" (yes, all four movements. I've just started the fourth - Vivace, which sounds in places like it must have been inspired by some kind of folk-dance. I can't play it as fast as it should be played but I can sort-of play it). I'm still working on "Castle in a Cloud." It strikes me as odd: most of the stuff I play, I have it memorized (to the point where I forgot my exercise book at home last week, but could play the piece from memory without it to prompt me), but I CANNOT get this memorized. I don't know. I think it's because (a) it has a lot of dissonances and I, having pretty much been raised on Baroque and Classical music, don't expect them and (b) it's in an odd minor key (um...D minor I think? Enharmonic with F?). Another part of it may be that the repeated "figures" are similar but not the same...and I tend to expect sameness, or at least what-seem-to-me logical differences in figures in a piece.

I have pretty much run through (this week is the last piece) the exercise book. The teacher started casting about in her files for something else for me. "There's a famous book of pieces by this person...I can't remember his name right now" she said. "Hanon?" I asked. Yes, that was the one. I told her I already had a copy, and so, I'm going to start working out of it next week. Oh, I'll probably come to dislike Hanon in the way I currently dislike "Sportacular Warmups book 4," but right now I'm kind of pleased that I am able to use a book I bought and also that I'm working from a book that many, many people in the past worked from. (I can't remember the original copyright date on the Hanon, but it's pretty early. I have a similar book of Bergmuller pieces that lists 1903 as the first copyright date). Again, it's kind of like the whole thing with knitting and quilting: I like that feeling of connectedness with the past. And while maybe none of my grandparents would recognize Hanon (none of them played the piano, except for maybe my paternal grandfather, a little bit), I still feel that sense of connectedness and groundedness that I like.

Heh.

It's been quite a while since I posted a LOLcat here (and yes, although the cool "popular" sorts may have deemed them passé, I still like them)

But this one made me laugh, and also pretty accurately demonstrates how I am feeling about one of the "skill building" pieces (it is from "Sportacular (ugh) Warm-Ups") I am learning for this week:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I had my first "fall" piano lesson yesterday.

Having run through the "accelerated advanced beginner" books I had been working from, my teacher decided to go a different route - I have a new theory book to work from (I really do like that she teaches theory along with the technique; for one thing, it makes things make more sense to me. For another, my brain likes it: "Here's a new pattern-language for you to play with! It's kind of like math but kind of not!"). I also have a book of warm-up exercises to work on.

And more sheet music. I'm still working on "Moonlight Sonata" (and I think my progress was pretty good; it's an arrangement but not greatly simplified and I can sort of play the entire first page - up to the point where the chords start changing and you go higher into the treble register with the right hand).

She also handed me a book of arrangements of "popular" pieces and said, "Flip through this and see if there's anything that interests you"

It's....an INTERESTING....compilation. It has several pieces from recent Disney movies ("You've got a friend in me" "Can you feel the love tonight," something from Tarzan). It's got "My Heart will go On" from Titanic (aaaagh, holding up a crucifix), "Hey Jude," something from Les Miz, and YMCA (yes, THAT YMCA).

Oh, it also has Ob-la-dee, Ob-la-Dah but it omits the verse about Desmond's sex-change (or I always presumed it to be such; maybe he's just a transvestite).

But I did find two that I wanted to work on. The first one, the theme from Mission: Impossible, I wound up rejecting for now because I think the odd rhythm would drive me a bit nuts at this point. And I liked my second choice better, anyway.

It was the theme from Chariots of Fire. I chose it in part because back when I was still just DAYDREAMING about learning to play the piano someday (even before the possibility of me getting my piano arose), this was one of the pieces that I thought, "It would be neat to be able to play that."

And now I'm working on it. True, it's a somewhat-simplified arrangement (and somehow, that does matter to me. Just as I'd rather read the unabridged form of a book, I'd rather play the "real" piece, but that will have to wait for now, I guess). But it's a good enough arrangement to sound reasonably like the original. Including the odd little "boom-ch-ch-ch" bit in the deep bass ("Like distant drums" goes the stage-direction on the music).

Right now I'm working on the first ten measures of it but will admit to "playing forward" (into the section with dotted eighth notes) just to see how it will sound.

It makes me happy to be working on stuff like this again. I really do think having the motivation of "you are going to be playing this for your teacher" is what I need to sit down and work on the piano. (Hopefully, eventually, I will be sufficiently motivated to work when I'm just playing for myself).

One of the things - I know I've said this before - that I like about the piano is that my success at it depends almost entirely on me. On my sitting down and practicing, on my putting in the necessary work. So many of the other things I do depend on other people to succeed: with grantsmanship, you can write a fantastic proposal, but if funding is limited or if someone writes an even more fantastic proposal and they need all the money available, forget it. With journal articles their acceptance is dependent on reviewers and editors, who are human and can in some cases make mistakes or who can have axes to grind. With teaching, even - if you get a classroom full of "don' wanna be here" people, that affects my mood and affects my teaching. (And it's harder to teach when you try to get a discussion going and are met by stony stares).

But with the piano, it's all on me - if I work hard, I can see myself succeed. And I like that.

It's almost a little bit like some of the reading I do (I'm continuing with The Tempest) - I don't HAVE to do it, but I feel like doing it makes me smarter and better and happier. (I do think that Shakespeare's comedies - and I guess you class The Tempest as a comedy, though I suppose it's technically a romance - are some of the best "take you out of the dreary here-and-now" type of reading. I love the language. I love the idea of this old guy inhabiting an island with his daughter, and believing that his library is "dukedom enough" for him or however the line goes. It's a nice antidote to people screaming about health insurance reform or the endless treadmill of stories about the bad economy.)

This is Thursday's post, incidentally. Until I get used to this summer schedule thing again posting is going to be weird and hiccupy - a couple posts on a single day, and then a day without posts. Apologies in advance to the discombobulated.

Oog. I taught from 8 Wednesday morning until just about 5 that afternoon, with a break long enough to write tests for Thursday. And then I had an evening meeting starting at 6:30.

I did manage to get in a half hour of piano practice. It pleases me how I have gone from absolutely NOT being able to play the first part of "The Wild Horseman" with both hands together to being kinda sorta able to play it. That's what keeps me going back to the piano, even despite frustrations, even despite so very many people being so much better at it than I - being able to see that kind of improvement day to day is a powerful motivator and I find it very rewarding.

(And I anticipate in a few more days, I will be even better at it.)

It's really hard to explain the kind of satisfaction I feel about being able to get steadily better on a piece...it's a type of satisfaction that I don't often get (so many of the things I do, their success or the evaluation of such is contingent on someone else's opinion) and it's something I really crave.

I can't quite think of anything else I have in my life that feels the same way - not even knitting and quilting, because I've been doing them so long and am fairly expert at them, that there really isn't a learning curve any more and it's more a satisfaction of getting something done or being able to see, for example, that I've completed a sleeve. It's not the same as, "Wow, I could not play this at all last week and now I can play it almost without mistakes and close to the speed at which it's supposed to be played." It's not exactly instant gratification but it's as close to instant gratification as I get in my life.

It may be that every week as I sit down at the piano and try to play the new stuff, I go "Oh no, I've reached the limit of my ability. I can not play this. I will never get better than I am right now." And yet I persist, and yet I do get better. It's almost like beating my learned pessimism about my musical abilities every day.

I also scored a minor book win this evening. After finishing up Pickwick the other night, I was casting about for something new to start on. (I am already reading "The Guns of August" - Barbara Tuchman's account of the beginning of WWI - but that's a non-fiction book, and I want a fiction book to read too).

One of the online commentaries about Pickwick that I looked at (I like to read a few commentaries about a novel, especially a so-called* Great Book, after I've finished it) and several of them noted that Vin Reid's "Moosepath League" books were a modern sort of Pickwick tale. I had read "Cordelia Underwood" several years ago (I have four books from the series - don't know if they're just the first four, or if they are the only four; I've not checked to see if the author has written any others).

(*"So called" because supposedly Dickens' novels were the "scandalous" books of their day - some young women were actually discouraged from reading them lest they be corrupted by a, gasp, NOVEL. Makes you wonder what will be considered the "Great Books" of 2150. Makes you worry a bit. Or at least it does me.)

I decided to re-read "Cordelia Underwood" (it's a pretty light book) and them maybe read the others in order. I found the first, third, and fourth books in the place I knew I had left them, but could not find the second - Mollie Peer, which I KNEW I had had, because I had started reading it at one point. Had I given it away? Lost it? Taken it with me when visiting family and left it there?

I felt a little bereft. I went through most of my book-stacks (My books are not organized in any logical way; in some cases I have similar topics roughly together but many of my shelves are the "Oh, I have a new bookshelf - time to get this random pile of books off the floor/off being double-banked on this other shelf"). Couldn't find it.

(I do find, to my embarrassment, that I have two copies of "Glory, Passion, and Principle" - a book about eight women who played some historical role in the American Revolution. As I have a hardback and a paperback copy, I can only assume I bought the hardback when it first came out, shelved it away, forgot it, and then saw the paperback a few years later and thought, "Wow, I want this book." If someone's dying for a copy, let me know...I would be willing to swap or maybe even outright give the paperback copy (it does have a slight ding - the front cover has a minor fold in one corner. Failing that, I might donate my hardback copy to the university library if they think they could use it.)

Anyway, I thought, "I wonder how much a new copy of "Mollie Peer" from Amazon would run?" followed almost immediately by, "Oh noes, what if "Mollie Peer" is out of print?"

Well, I checked. Yes, it apparently is, but there are many used copies. But they all have high shipping and none were eligible for the free 2-day Prime shipping. (Yes, I buy a subscription to that every year. It's one of my few luxuries. But it's so wonderful and I can often get a book from Amazon faster than I can find the time to drive to the Books a Million and hope they have it.)

So I thought, Okay, time to look again.

And a second hunt - this time on the shelf full of books-saved-from-childhood (you KNEW I had those, didn't you?) turned it up. I guess I stuck it there in a fit of cleaning.

So anyway, my set is back together, and I think I will start re-reading "Cordelia Underwood" tonight, with plans to continue on some of my copious (hah) free time this weekend - maybe set up and try to knit on the stalled Cobblestone Pullover sleeve while I read, seeing as it's pretty basic stockinette.

Thirteen pounds of sheet music.

My uncle had called me a while back - he had a client (he's a stockbroker) who gave him a bunch of sheet music (from a family estate, I think?). He had offered it to his son, who is in the process of training to be an opera singer, but he didn't want it (not his style, plus, he's at that peripatetic stage of education where having a lot of stuff is not a good idea). So he asked me if I wanted it. I said sure, being a sucker for that kind of thing.

He sent it while was gone - but I had a neighbor pick up the UPS box from my porch. I got it from her yesterday.

It's an interesting mix of stuff, mostly from the 1930s, I'm guessing. A lot of it is the sort of sentimental "drawing room" pieces - reprints of the kind of stuff a young woman in the 1800s might have learned as part of her arsenal for snagging a husband. (I presume after marriage and children she would not have so much time for playing music). I like that kind of music - and though I can't play any of it yet, maybe someday I can.

There's also a lot of...I guess you'd say, Catholic-themed music? Several songs about the rosary, one called something like the Knights of Columbus March, it's sort of an interesting window into what the long-ago person chose. (There are also a few "Irish" pieces, though the name written on a number of the music books is "Engelbreit" - I assume the Engelbreit was the owner of them, and that's a German name)

There are also a number of pop songs. They range from 1910 (the earliest copyright I noticed) until the early 60s (there is a song from the movie "A Patch of Blue").

It's an interesting mixture. The things I pulled out and set aside (in the "I might want to learn to play this sometime" pile as opposed to the "I will need to find somewhere to store this" pile) include a slightly-simplified arrangement of Clair de Lune (slightly simplified, but still beyond my expertise), a copy of "O Sweet Mystery of Life" (kept mainly for comic effect; thinking of the last scene of "Young Frankenstein"), a couple Sousa marches, Daisy Bell, "Believe me if all those endearing young charms" (an old edition of that; it has no copyright date but it looks fairly old), "Let me call you sweetheart" (which I love and would love to be able to play; I can pick out the melody line but the harmonization is still a bit more complex.)

There's also a piece called "Oh, Johnny, Oh" which I know better from an old Tex Avery cartoon. (it starts at about 3:30 in that YouTube clip. And they've slightly rewritten it to apply to the wolf in the cartoon - rather than the eponymous Johnny).

(It's funny, actually, a lot of the older songs I know from "classic" cartoons. Picking out the melody of "All those endearing young charms" reminded me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Yosemite Sam had set the piano with dynamite under one of the keys that you play in the song...and that Bugs kept "intentionally" making a mistake and missing that key - in fact, it's a mistake that's very easy to make when you're trying to play the song, I made it myself)

I really hope I do develop enough skill to play some of these things someday. Right now I look at them and despair a little - could anyone actually play that? Obviously they must have been able to. Even a few pieces marked as "grade school level" or "simplified for young players" are still beyond what I can do.

"They" say you need 10,000 hours of practice at something before you become an expert at it. I hope it doesn't take that full amount to become at least marginally proficient, because 10,000 hours, at one hour a day (about the most I can manage), is just over 27 years and 3 months. And you know, that's kind of discouraging to think about.

Chris: good point, except the files are behind a password-protected "firewall" that I only open for a short period of time. And I've never left it unattended when I was logged in. (And besides, she'd have had to spend a lot of time searching for what she had wanted to steal; I had about 15 old presentations on there - all of which have now been "slurped" onto a flash drive and deleted from the desk top).

I suspect what happened was the other student gave her her paper (innocently, I think) as "Hey, here's what I did, you can use the same procedures as I used" and without realizing the student would just steal her data.

At any rate - it's over with. Student gets a zero, regardless of whether the other student was a dupe or a co-conspirator.

I'm surprised at how TIRED this has left me. Just worn out. I'm glad my exams are already written.

****

This week is a "slower" week for piano practicing - next Tuesday is my last lesson for this semester before a couple-weeks break between it and the summer session starting in June.

So to still get in some practice time (most of the lesson book stuff this week is pedal-work, WHICH I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THANK YOU and not very complex stuff to play, I pulled out some other books I have.

Including the "Orange" John Schaum book (which I've talked about before). This is an older book, I think my dad got it in a boxlot at an auction shortly after we got the piano. It's always been a bit more advanced than however-far I got in previous lessons, but I could kind of noodle out a few of the pieces in there.

Well, in January I was disappointed to see how much my skill had decayed. (And I think one thing I've noticed, learning the piano at an older age - I "lose" stuff faster, and I don't progress as fast, as I did when I was a kid)

But I found that this week, I could play a few of the pieces in there (particularly the "Ruben and Rachel in Society" - a funny little pastiche-piece where the old folk tune is arranged to sound like Mozart, a Strauss waltz, Chopin, and Sousa, and a medley of simplified Strauss waltzed). I couldn't play them PERFECTLY - there were halting spots and mistakes - but I could play them BETTER than I could in January. Clearly better.

I also find that I can play the D major scale (I'm going through the scales, week by week, doing either contrary or parallel motion and then doing the blocked and broken chords and arpeggios - so I'm only up to D now) through pretty much perfectly without having to think about where my fingers go - both the "do I switch after 3 or 4 here" thing, or the remembering-the-sharps thing. So I guess I am beginning to learn, my hands are beginning to get more skillful at this.

You know, I realize another thing I like about learning piano: there are no short cuts to it. The only way you get better is to put your derriere on the bench and practice. And if you practice more, you get better faster. (It's FAIR. It seems like one of the few things in life that is FAIR right now - the harder I work on a piece, the better I get at it. It's simple but it's strangely comforting). You can't cheat your way to playing the piano well. And while some people may have more talent, there's probably a point where talent + not practicing = less talent + rigorous practice or even talent - practice < less talent + rigorous practice.

I don't know; it's nice to have something that feels fair in that way. Where my effort is rewarded by getting better. Maybe not concert-quality better, but better enough to make a difference to me. And also knowing that the "better" came about because I worked at it.

The piano books I learn from have all kinds of unusual stuff in them. There are some bits that are heavily-arranged classical themes (this week I have a snippet of the "Can-Can" from "Orpheus in the Underworld," which is actually kind of fun to play on the piano).

And then I got this other piece. And I was all, "Darn, that's *familiar.*" Until the words 'arky, arky' popped into my mind. Oh, it's this old Sunday School (or Vacation Bible School, where I think I actually heard it) song.

But I had either never heard, or had forgotten, this line, about the animals finally leaving the ark:

"The animals came off, came off in threesies, threesies
The animals came off in threesies, threesies
Must have been the birds and beesies, beesies"

AH hahahahaha!

Well, I made the decision yesterday.

I will be taking part in the spring piano recital. My teacher doesn't require it of her adult students (apparently she does of the junior students). But I decided I wanted to.

Because I find it moderately amusing to think of participating in my first-ever recital at 40.

I'm going to be playing the Ecossaise in G. We had originally thought of a more modern piece I was working on - a piece by Robert Vandall (funny, he looks different than I would have pictured him). It didn't have a title; it was just known as "18."

But I'd rather do the Ecossaise; I always found it hard to figure out the best interpretation for "18" - how fast to play it, how to make it sound. It was a piece much more dependent on individual expression than on technical ability (which the Ecossaise requires). Also, I think my feel for the classical piece is better; it's like I understand better what it "means." It's supposed to be a Scottish-style dance, you play it lightly and perhaps with a bit of a sense of humor. The Vandall piece at times sounded melancholy to me; at others, quiet and peaceful. I tried to envision waves lapping on a beach as I played it (the only thing it really put me in mind of). But it was hard for me to get it to sound consistent, and that kind of bothered me.

So I'm going to go back to work on the Ecossaise. I hadn't been playing it in as heavy a rotation because I figured I was essentially "done" with it, but really all I need to do is polish it up and be sure I have it fully memorized.

The question does come up of how one dresses for a recital. I'm thinking a plain dark skirt and white blouse. (No, I won't go out and buy a frilly recital-dress like the little girls learning piano might wear).

I love Amazon so much.

I have a membership to their "Prime" service; it's kind of pricey up-front but it gets you a year's worth of second-day delivery for free (even on books sent to other addresses as gifts). Many of their things are Prime-eligible.

And today, I found something I'd been wanting.

My piano teacher had loaned me a copy of volume 1 of the Bastein "Piano Literature" library - it is the book that has Beethoven's Ecossaise in G (the first "real" piece I ever learned, and it will always hold a special place in my heart for that, I think). I've since more or less mastered the piece (memorized it even) and kept thinking she was going to ask for the book back...and I was (on my "own time") working on Bach's Minuet in G from the same book, so I was kind of loath to suggest returning it.

But then I decided to look for my own copy.

And yup, Amazon has it. Less than $5, even. (And they had others in the same series, which I decided to order as well). So now I have more books of fairly basic but "real" classical piano literature to work from. And I can give my teacher back her book; maybe there is another student who can be inspired by it.

(one good thing about the Bastien books for beginners like me is that they have fingerings marked, at least on the tricky bits, so you don't do it wrong, and so you don't do it inefficiently)

(Really, the Ecossaise and now, the Minuet are my "ice cream" pieces - they are what I play "for fun" when I've completed the teaching-pieces for the week).

They say money can't buy happiness but sometimes I think money CAN buy the tools for us to make ourselves happy with. Sitting down at the piano for 15 or 20 minutes before going to bed and slowly working my way through the Minuet in G or some of the other pieces I have is one of the surprisingly pleasurable things in my life right now.

One of the interesting things about learning to play the piano is that, for me as an educator, the learning process becomes more "transparent."

I suppose I don't notice "how I learn" with a lot of the other things I do (like reading journal articles about a topic I don't know as much about - right now I'm planning a side-project on surveying the soil invertebrate population on the prairie restoration site - because it's a mode of learning I've used so long and so much that it's second nature).

One thing I notice is the wisdom of the "work on it some each day." I had this pretty well drilled into me from high school on - if you are taking a difficult class, don't wait until right before the exam to study, do a LITTLE studying each day.

That is also true with practicing. My teacher told me: even if ALL you can practice in one day is 15 minutes, do that. Don't not-practice and then try to make it up on the weekend.

And I see that. Because I see how I progressively get better with each day's practicing. Some days it may be a miniscule, almost-undetectable amount; others, it will be a considerable gain. But the only way to get that is through the reinforcement of working daily.

The other thing I notice is the truth of something I read somewhere, figured made sense, and always tell students about: you learn things best if you have the chance to sleep between sessions of learning. It is as if the pathways solidify during sleep, or something. (Or maybe not solidify, that's probably not the right word. Maybe "strengthen" is better). I can go from barely being able to play a piece one day to being able to play it mostly successfully the next - and that without any practice time or even really THINKING about the piece. It's as if my brain works on it without my paying attention to it.

I assume that is the same way for studying anything.

It is interesting to pay attention to the "meta" of learning something like this. (Or maybe it's just interesting to ME, since I work as a sort of an educator). But I like that a couple of things that I believed to be true about learning seem to be borne out by my experience. (And yes, I know: "anecdote" is not the singular of "data.")

Another thing I notice about practicing, and I think this is why it puts me in a better mood to be able to do it, is that it is one time out of my day when I HAVE to "uni-task."

I know, it's long been said the wave of the future - nay, the only way for us to "adapt" - is to multi-task. To do five things at once. And in my experience, that means doing five things, each more slowly and more poorly than they would be done if I could just stop and devote my full attention to each thing in its rightful order.

I am a poor multi-tasker.

And I know, being able to multi-task is supposedly the hallmark of being female. It is supposedly our genetic legacy from our cavewoman ancestors who had to make sure their babies weren't crawling off a cliff, while simultaneously scanning the horizon for predators, looking for edible leaves and berries, weaving together a new mat of grass for the cave floor, and wondering just WHERE Og was with that giant sloth steak he promised to get?

But I just don't multi-task well. I notice several things when I multi-task:

1. I make more mistakes. I have had to have more assignments and exams re-copied than I care to admit because I was trying to talk to someone on the phone while writing them - or I was toggling back and forth between that and entering grades.

2. I don't work as fast. It seems like the "toggling back and forth" eats up time.

3. It distresses me. I find I am far more stressed out at the end of a time period where I've had to juggle five different things than I am at the end of a time period (even if it takes more time) where I could do each thing, as I said, in its proper order. I think it's because multi-tasking creates a false sense of urgency.

I think a sense of urgency - especially false urgency - is one of the great malaises of our time. The idea that we have to DO something, NOW - that we cannot take time to contemplate and plan - that we have to be busy or at least LOOK busy - that time is money (no, it isn't. Time is more than money. Time is the only thing that the richest man on earth and the lowliest beggar in Mumbai get the exact same amount of each day. Time is the only thing you can't get BACK, even if you spent all the money in the world).

I think it is one of those things - like the drumbeat of bad news stories, that the economy is failing, that we will all be out of work soon, that everything in the air water and food will kill us AFTER giving us some kind of hideous cancer, that we have probably irreversibly poisoned our world and just haven't seen the canary in the mineshaft keel over yet - that if you pay attention to it, it can kill you. Oh yes, I think it can. I think a person who is too driven to be busy - too driven to achieve - can make themselves very sick. I know I've made myself minorly sick by pushing myself to the degree that I ever do.

And so I think we need to be able to do things where we can take a breath and say, "This is the ONLY thing I am going to pay attention to for the next 40 minutes."

In its own way, it is like prayer or meditation. You cannot pray effectively if your mind keeps pinging off on other things. (Though maybe the "you can't multitask" isn't all that true; I've actually prayed while knitting or weeding or doing some other simple repetitive task and found I actually stayed on my thoughts better, and derived a greater sense of peace, than if I was just trying to sit still. And there is also "walking meditation" where you walk a labyrinthine path of inlaid tiles). But at any rate - you have to give your full concentration to it to be effective.

And I think that's the insidiousness of multi-tasking - it fragments our concentration. It, in effect, gives us a sort of ADD. (I wonder how many people who were diagnosed with ADD as adults may have come by it through years of multitasking. I know, it's a neurotransmitter thing, but I can't help but wonder if sometimes behaviors and thought-patterns affect the production and uptake of neurotransmitters).

So it's a relief to be able to sit down and do one thing - and one thing only. And not to have to fear interruption. (I don't work as well in my office as I do at home, because of the constant stream of phone calls, people knocking on my door, noise in the hall...)

I think this is also why I like piecing quilt tops - while I can listen to music while doing it, I really can't do anything else - I can't multitask.

I guess in a couple of ways I tend to run counter to trends. I've said to people that I think in the future the ultimate luxury will NOT being "reachable at all times" (when cell phones were first available and were still a status symbol, being reachable at all times was a mark of an Important Person) but to be able to go somewhere WITHOUT being able to be reached.

And likewise, I think perhaps the hallmark of good time management and someone who does their job well may be someone who doesn't HAVE to multitask; who can plan and do one thing at once without feeling torn in fifteen different directions.

I do think we will have to, at some point, come to a saner pace of life: I don't doubt that the being pushed to be available 24/7 and to extend the workday more and more hours. Oh, I know, in this economic climate people will tell people to do just that - to make themselves "indispensable" by turning themselves into a version of those robots that work on the car assembly lines. But I look at where we're going - a utilitarian world where things are valued based on how they can advance us or how much money they will make us - and it makes me kind of sad.

And not just because two magazines I used to subscribe to have closed down. And a tea room I used to love. And an antiques shop that was one of my favorites in the world.

I just fear a grey uniform future - where everyone is a cog in a machine, and where the concept of doing something for your own amusement or your own edification is seen as perhaps a dangerous aberration.

And while I hate the whole activist-we-are-saving-the-world-through-craft attitude that some people take, I do like to think of my setting aside an hour a day (if I can at all manage that much time) to work on learning to play the piano as my own little quixotic protest against a culture that tells me that the only things worth doing are things that put more money in my pocket or more accolades after my name.

(One of the things I hate about myself: I get the feeling of "You're wasting your life!" on a more or less regular basis. Because I haven't done anything BIG. I think it's almost as damaging to a child to raise them with the expectation that they will do Great Things as it is to tell them they Will Never Amount To Anything, because then that child grows up, and if they don't want to go in for the near-monomania that it takes to do truly Great Things (spending 20 hours a day working on research, for example), then they feel like a failure - and like they are wasting their life. I kind of had to stuff that emotion down a little at the Quammen talk the other night, when, in the introduction the person talked about all the stuff he'd done. And he's not that much older than I am (I think). So I don't know. Part of it is that so much of what I do is intangible - it's not like a book you can point to on a shelf. But sometimes I do wish I had someone to remind me that I'm NOT wasting my life when I get to feeling like I am...)

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.

Okay, all the bad that happened this week - dealing with rude representatives of a particular business, the misunderstandings, the getting the final gold crown put in (and requiring a second surprise shot of Novocaine - with its attendant heart-thumping epinephrine - because I jumped when he started to clean the stump of the tooth), the busy-ness, the mild asthma symptoms that make me feel like my lungs want to crawl out of my chest - all of it is wiped away and gone, or at the very least made far far better.

Because my piano came today.



I rushed home after class to wait for the deliverers. They called almost at the very time they said they would, to ask for final directions to my house.

It was the owner of the piano-refurbishing business (and if you have a piano practically anywhere in the continental US that needs work, they can get it and work on it, and I can vouch for their work), his 20-something son and his probably-20-something-but-looked-younger daughter.

They were very quick about getting it off the truck and set up. And they know their stuff - they have a heater in the trailer (which meant that a re-tuning turned out not to be necessary), the piano was totally swaddled up to protect it. They got it in my house with no problems at all - I was prepared to take the doors off the hinges - but that was not necessary.

They are extremely nice people. I would guess that doing that kind of work - where you are restoring something to beauty and functionality, and then getting to deliver it to a delighted recipient - probably MAKES you a nice person if you weren't inclined that way already. It seems like a happy sort of career.

Some more photographs, because I can't resist and because I canNOT believe how beautiful and wonderful it looks. This was a piano that sat for years in my grandparents' oil-heated house, and if you know anything about oil heat, it is MESSY - it leaves a scummy film over everything. And I think it may be corrosive, too, remembering the state of the "guts" of the piano (the cast-iron part the strings are attached to) before the renovation:



Seriously, this is a work of art.

The daughter - her name is Savanah - did all the lettering-painting. She said it was her favorite part of the job. She is a more patient woman than I am, apparently.

I know you never saw the piano before its renovation, but trust me - this is an incredible change and improvement. The piano wasn't trashed or anything before, but I didn't realize just how worn it was until I saw its rebirth.

The nameplate:



I'm told it is a Model L from 1927, which is older than I thought (I know my grandfather got it during the Depression; it was in lieu of payment one year).

And the keyboard. And yes, I've already done part of the day's practice on it.



The music on the stand is actually one of the books my mom sent me. It's my beloved John Shaum "Orange" book, which I never actually attained in my earlier lessons (I think this one came in a box of sheet music my dad bought at an auction) but it has so many fun "noodling around" pieces in it that I remember pushing myself to try to play them. (The book is open to "Ruben and Rachel in Society," a funny little resetting of the folk tune to mimic the styles of Mozart, J. Strauss Jr., Chopin, and finally, Sousa).

The tone of the piano is far more resonant than what I am used to. Mr. Kapteyn remarked on the good acoustics of my little living room, especially the fact that I had a hardwood floor (I didn't think about it but yes, I can see how a hardwood floor would be preferable for piano-playing than a carpet would).

I had them set it up so the keyboard end is closest to the windows in that room - so when I sit at the piano I have natural light, and I can look out the window while taking a little break from playing. It seems a pretty good set up.

I am delighted to have it. And it amazes me how little time, really, it took for this particular dream to come to fruition (well, the having of the piano. Actually being able to play well enough to satisfy myself, I am still working on that and can see working on that for a long time). I first started contemplating the desire for a piano back in 2006. My father made the original offer of the piano late in March of last year, and then there was some intermediate disappointment, but finally they found the good piano people, and plans changed yet again. The piano went off to the "piano spa" back in November, and today it begins its new life with me.

It is probably - with the exception of my house - the nicest thing I have ever owned. (It is certainly nicer, and I suspect worth more, than my car is now). It may be the nicest thing I ever WILL own.

My mother once said that when she was younger, she was always a little afraid to be too happy when something really good happened - out of fear that it would be taken care of her. But that she eventually grew out of it.

I am not afraid to be too happy about this. I just hope I can keep up with the lessons, and improve my skill, and someday (not too far in the future, I hope) be able to play Bach or Chopin or Brahms or even Vince Guaraldi on it.

I heard this (the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star variations, or as they are properly known, "Ah, vous dirai-je maman* variations, K. 265" by Mozart on KING-fm right now.

(*which was apparently a sort of borderline-bawdy song, about a late-teenaged girl who confided to her mother that she was very nearly - or in some versions, was in actual fact - seduced by a man)

That's it - that's the kind of thing I want to be able to play eventually. To be able to play things that are light and amusing to me. (I actually - years and years ago, when I was first taking lessons - noodled around a little bit trying to play parts of this by ear).

I wonder how hard they are to play? I wonder if they're something I could work up to fairly soon?

Oh, and for the Latin fans in my audience, I present a Latin translation (found on Wikipedia so don't fault me if it's wrong) of Twinkle Twinkle:

Mica, mica, parva stella,
Miror quaenam sis tam bella.
Super terra in caelo,
Alba gemma splendido.
Mica, mica, parva stella,
Miror quaenam sis tam bella.

Ellen: no, no lying in front of doors. Then again, I don't have a drawing room or a tureen to worry about ;) (I do keep most of my amigurumi; right now they are decorating my bedroom. Yes, I realize that most people would view that as kind of childish; I really do not care.)

It was a nice, peaceful weekend. (The best kind, I'm convinced.)

(Piano update is at the very end in case anyone is bored by it and wants to skip that section).

I worked a bit more on the Sock Monkey quilt - all the pieces are cut, the simpler blocks are sewn, and the first of the more-complex blocks (two "pinwheels" set with solid squares) has been made. (No pictures yet; I think I'm going to wait until I lay out the quilt).

I also read a bunch for a fire-ecology class I'm helping teach (and yes, the students have already begun doing the Beavis and Butthead impressions. I think that's kind of required in a fire ecology class).

And I finished my first-ever pair of toe-up socks:

They even fit.

As I said, I'm going to use some Regia that I had deep in the stash (I think I got it on sale somewhere, and when it arrived I was kind of like, yuck, why did I buy this color? so it will be good experimentation yarn) to try out a modification of the pattern with a deeper heel flap. This is an attempt at "perfecting" the fit because I do find I have a couple stitch patterns I want to plug into socks, but that would only really work starting at the toe.

I also started a new scarf:



Diann, remember this? The yarn you said you bought because you liked it and then realized the color was wrong for you? I'm making just a simple feather-and-fan scarf out of it. (I really had planned to for a couple years, but just never got around to starting it).

I like the opal-like quality of the colors and I think it works well with the feather and fan pattern. (Really, sometimes, I think the simple old stitch patterns are the best - this is probably the most basic lace pattern out there)

And here's the January mantel. I like the "icy" effect I've done the past couple years (with candles in all kinds of clear glass holders) that I did it again. Here are all the candles, lit:



(Forgive the shakiness; it was taken with the "extreme night" long exposure time and the "tripod" I jury-rigged out of books wasn't as stable as I thought it was)

Also, one of my favorite things, which always finds a place on my mantel, regardless of how I have it decorated:



These are little copper tealight holders. You can see they have words punched out of them so the candle light shines out through the words. My dad got these for me for Christmas several years ago. They make me very happy.

I did other things - put in a couple more hours of practice on the piano (and discovered that the piano in the Fellowship Hall has a much better tone and doesn't have an annoying "click" in the G above middle C. My church has a great abundance of spinet pianos but most of them haven't been kept up well and they're either badly out of tune or have sustained some damage somewhere).

And you know, I've learned two things already:

1. An hour is the absolute limit I can sit at the piano in one "chunk" and work productively. As I close in on the hour, that's when I begin to make mistakes.

2. My piano teacher was absolutely right when she said that consistent practice is better than a big chunk one day and nothing other days. I didn't disbelieve her on that, after all, she has years of experience and it makes sense - but I really saw it in action this weekend. I think it's like learning anything - if you sleep after learning, somehow it gets "set in" better. I could play the little Mozart piece MUCH BETTER today than I could either yesterday or Friday. I'm even beginning to notice and do things like, "Ease up on the left-hand chords; they are sounding too dominant" and being able to put in legato where there's legato and staccato where there's staccato.

And one of my big worries - and I think this goes back to some bad advice I got from a music teacher years ago (I don't like to speak ill of the dead - and he did pass fairly recently - so I'll just describe it as bad advice). It kind of doomed me to thinking that I could only learn to play "technically proficiently," that I would always play like a machine and not be able to put FEELING into it. But I'm beginning to hear the hints of feeling in my practicing. So maybe there's hope yet.

I am tempted to go a bit "rogue" and see if I can find some copies of the Well-Tempered Clavier books and buy them to have when I feel like messing about on my own. There's one piece extracted from Book 1 at the very end of my performance book. I tried it out today and while I am far, far from perfect on it - it brought me so much joy to be able to do it. To play it, and to hear it, and to recognize it as a piece I've heard before. It's all based on arpeggios so it's not that hard (It's also "arranged," and therefore made less hard. But still).

I may also ask my folks to dig around in the music chest they have at home and see if they can find the old exercise books I had years ago - I think maybe I had one of Clementi's books (did he write for piano? Or did I have that book for clarinet? I don't remember).

I will say I will be so glad when my piano arrives (less than 2 weeks, now.) My plans for my day off tomorrow are to move the necessary furniture and clean so there is a space for it. I envision being able to practice for ten or fifteen minutes in the morning before heading out the door to work, and being able to sit down and "decompress" at the end of the day by practicing. (Right now, I usually switch on the tv to one of the all-news channels. It is probably spiritually healthier for me to sit down at the piano instead. And there's at least a half-hour there most days that's "empty" time otherwise). I know I will be able to make time to practice, especially once the piano is here. (One of the men in my Sunday School class has often commented that "people find time for the things they value" as a response when he hears about someone claiming they "don't have time" for this or that. While that may not be strictly true 100% of the time, I do think there's some truth to it - thinking of all the quilters and knitters out there with far busier lives than I lead, or the people who sing in choirs, or who read far more books than I do.)

So far have accumulated 1 hr. 30 min. of piano practice time. I'm doing OK, I guess, progress-wise, but I'm going to have to work very hard to fight down the demon of perfectionism that makes me go, "I can't play this piece perfectly even after working on it for a while. I guess I am not worthy of owning a piano."

I'm hoping I will get more than one week on some of the pieces. I really do not remember how fast one was expected to advance from my earlier days of piano lessons. I feel like I'm not advancing fast enough. We'll see what the teacher says on Tuesday.

I also need to work harder on the left-hand stuff, even though the right hand is generally the one that gets the interesting bits. My left hand is weak and I tend to get my first three fingers tangled up when doing scales.

I will say, though, that I do relax considerably sitting down at the piano. I guess it is because I know that I have to concentrate on THIS and ONLY THIS and that no one can interrupt me (working alone in an empty church parlor helps; I may take to unplugging the phone at home when I start practicing there).


One of my big problems at work, I've come to realize, is that I anticipate interruption. And thus, I can never concentrate on things to the extent I'd like - going in on weekends works a lot better because a lot of the time I'm alone, I feel like I can keep my office door closed, and the phone usually does not ring.

I need to learn to be more protective of my time.

Also about the piano - I like that the teacher gave me a couple of "ice cream" pieces (or I think of them as such - I save them for when I'm done with the scales and other exercises). One is a very simplified Mozart piece. They call it "German Dance." I recognize it as a theme from (I think) one of his symphonies, but I don't remember the exact source. It's the one that goes BA-dum, BA-dum, ba-dum-dum-dum-dum dum-dum and then there's a run of eighth notes....I can sing it in my head and I recognize it but it bugs me a little that I can't remember the exact source.

But hey, I'm playing Mozart. Even if in highly-arranged form. And that's enough of a carrot to keep me driving over to the church and sitting in the chilly parlor and running through endless renditions of "Running for the Taxi" and "Passing a French Bakery" and "At the Art Museum" and "The Eiffel Tower" (And yes, those are the names of all four of the little finger-exercise pieces I have for this week. When I get bored I try playing them off tempo a bit - syncopated, or trying to force the thing into waltz time. Or making up chording for it instead of playing the left-hand stuff as written. I'm a little afraid of doing it too much and learning them "wrong," though).

The two hardest things to over come for me right now are that there are specific fingering patterns - there's a particular finger that is supposed to play a particular key, it's not just holding your hands any old way and hoping you hit the notes right, and also just the fact that it's an unfamiliar thing to be doing with my hands and I still make a lot of mistakes. And I have to fight twin impulses when I make mistakes: the impulse to give up, and conversely, the impulse to force myself to keep doing it until I get it PERFECT. Because there's a point at which tiredness creeps in and you can't get it PERFECT, I think.

My piano (well, really, my grandfather's piano, that is how I will always think of it) is DONE! I got the e-mail today. It is still set to be delivered on the 30th.

I will be so happy to get it. I can't wait to start practicing on it.

I had my first lesson today (normally they are on Tuesdays but because of faculty meetings this week I couldn't go Tuesday). The teacher told me I still remembered the proper "form" (how you are supposed to hold your hands) and I remembered more about reading music than I thought I would. So she bumped me up a book (to a more advanced level). I'm already going to start playing "real" stuff - I have a simplified version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" to work on, and a (probably simplified, but I haven't looked that closely at it) piece by Mozart.

It's great. I feel like parts of my brain that have been mostly dormant for 25 years are starting to stretch and wake up.

Now I just need to manage to make some time each day to get down to church and practice. (It will be much easier once the actual piano arrives; then I can use the odd little 15 minute stretches I sometimes have first thing in the morning or in the evening or even if I go home for lunch some days. I love the thought of being able to run home, eat lunch, and de-stress a little by playing scales or exercises.

Funny how when you're a kid, you resist it and it GIVES you stress, but as an adult, the thought of practicing piano is something that sounds relaxing...)