Golden Julibee

This year I've been playing the piano for 50 years. Wow. I should be a little better at it, don't you think?  Actually, I'm not bad at playing the hymns at church. It's become my only genre, mostly. Since 1989, each time we moved into a new ward, within a short time, I became the organist because there wasn't really anyone else who could do it. In one ward, I played for Sacrament meeting and then went in and played for Primary, too. For several months, I led the singing and played the piano for that Primary. There just weren't very many musical people in that ward. Luckily, more people moved in gradually and some of them could play and lead the singing.

I started playing in second grade. I remember my mother cautioning me not to talk so much during my lessons because I spent the time talking instead of playing. Then one day, we'd had an exciting adventure begin our school day, and I heeded her message to just shut up and play, and my mom then expressed her amazement that I didn't tell the piano teacher about the skunk in the school. I was trying to obey. ( Yes, yes, somehow a baby skunk was put into our tiny four room school---through a window into the cafeteria room. We arrived at school and the cook had already been there and found her furry guest, so she called a neighbor to come over and trap it --- gently --- and take it out without fouling the atmosphere with musk. He was successful and so we went on with our regular school day without having to hold class outside.)

I enjoyed piano lessons. It was a novelty. Each Friday, as my Dad drove the school bus through town on his way south to return all of the students to their homes, he'd let my sisters and I off the bus at one corner that was just a long block away from the piano teacher's home. We'd walked down to her house, let ourselves in, get comfortable on her fluffy couches with a comic book and wait for our turn in the alcove off her kitchen to play our simple songs.  I loved reading the comic books. There was a huge shelf of them, and since comic books were forbidden in my house, I devoured them. My favorite genre was the true stories of WW II. I learned about the Bataan Death March, the Dolittle Raid over Tokyo, Pearl Harbor and the battles for Guam from these magazines. No one ever addressed WW II in school. American history never got to the "modern" times, so this was my only information. I knew my dad had been a sailor in that war, but no one ever discussed it.

Then, after we were finished (when I went to school in town --instead of the tiny one--it was just one sister and I taking lessons) Mother would come by to pay and pick us up. She paid with two dozen eggs and two dollars. Then, we'd get in the car and be her egg deliverers around the town. She had a group of ladies who'd put their empty cartons on a shelf in their porch, or meet us at the door with them in hand, and we'd carefully carry that week's order to them and collect the money. (Elder Bednar's mother-in-law was one of our customers.) I'm digging in the deepest pockets of my brain to try and figure out how many cartons we delivered on Fridays, and I'm thinking that it could have been 25 or 30. Most people took 2 dozen each week. I don't know where she got the customers and I think she used the money for groceries because that was where we went last on our Friday town trips. We'd get home from piano lessons/grocery store/egg deliveries and then go out and milk. My dad usually had it started, because we'd get home about five or five-thirty--late for milking. 

We had to practice the piano every day, too. Mother had heard all these songs many times, and so, even though she didn't play, she could call out--"That's not right. Try again."  I learned the melodies to famous operas and I learned lots of themes to classical music through piano lessons. My favorite thing to do in high school, was to just sit at the piano and play songs and sing to myself when no one was home. I still like to do that.

I've written before how I developed skill at the hymns, and since musical genres are quite different from each other, I'll probably never get good at playing classical music in its original form because I don't practice it. Simple arrangements of songs are all I can handle. I do fine with "Home Means Nevada to Me" and I think I've talked here about discovering that my ELL kids were willing to sing in English even if they were too shy to read aloud in English, so I found a way to incorporate songs into many of my lessons.

Last night, we were talking about My Golden Jubilee, and how I still can't play the pedals on the organ. CoolGuy said, "Why don't you just play them?"  I asked him why he didn't just climb up on that wall, juggle six tennis balls and then start tap dancing.  That's what the organ pedals do for my brain. I'm good with playing different notes with each hand, keeping the beat and playing on. But my brain just cannot add that one more thing of the pedals. Maybe if I practice for another 50 years....