Allegro

When I was in third grade, all I wanted to do was take piano lessons.  My mom would ask what I wanted to do, soccer, gymnastics, whatever else kids sign up for, and all I begged for was to take piano lessons.  The glitch was that our family didn't have a piano.  It's not like buying a karate uniform or a basketball goal, but my parents started watching the classifieds.  I'm so grateful that they did that- how much easier would it have been to stop at "We don't have a piano!"?  Eventually they found a beautiful upright piano for sale at a small church.  I remember watching the piano get maneuvered out of the bed of a pick-up truck in our driveway.

I took piano lessons from fourth grade through high school.  Like anything, there are varying levels of intensity to piano lessons, from the concert pianist track to scheduling back to back lessons with your friend Kathleen so you can tell your piano teacher all about homecoming in between lessons.  My friend Kathleen did have the same piano teacher as I did, so guess which track I took.  

By a wonderful twist of perseverance and fate, I far outlasted my siblings in piano playing, each of them only lasting a few months or a year at most.  So when Trent and I moved into our house seven years ago, my parents gave us the piano.  The piano had never been tuned in all the years it sat at my parents house (I was the only one playing and they had already purchased a piano- how much more can you expect?) and after a trip down I-10 in the back of Brad and Dad Piano Movers's van, it sat largely unplayed still.  At that point it was vastly out of tune.  I kept meaning to call a piano tuner but we also kept having new kids arriving in our family.

But a few months ago I got a name of a piano tuner from a friend and called.  Was it even possible to tune an -almost- hundred year old piano that hadn't been tuned in at least 25 years?  He said he would look at it.  And he did.  He was a dream come true, spending almost twenty hours at our house doing repairs, replacing a broken key and a broken string, tightening things up and vacuuming out dust.  Through all the repairs, he warned us that there was a moderate possibility that the strings would just start snapping when he started tuning and he wouldn't be able to continue. 

I prayed that the strings wouldn't break, that the piano could be tuned.  And it was!  It is!  Just in time for piano lessons to start all over again, with Rush.   

What a pleasant surprise to remember that I can play the piano!  When my mom visited recently I pulled her into the room to demonstrate a sonata I once learned for a piano recital.  She remembered it and immediately had some kind of horrific flashback and left the room, implying that suffering through your children learning an instrument is possibly not one of the highlights of motherhood.  Hopefully knowing that all the money spent on lessons wasn't wasted outweighs the flashback.

I've been practicing everyday.  Practicing is equally encouraging and discouraging- I can see improvement, but also realize how many hours one would really have to devote to be flawless. The kids cry and yell, "not the piano!" and I just ignore them.  I looked up tips for memorizing music, and many people recommended practicing with distractions to make your brain go into a super focus mode.  Plus there's no set-up or take down, just walk into the room and sit down.  Finally, I've found a very compatible hobby to my line of work!

It's a new day in the Williams house, a new day!