So, like, 30 years ago my then-2.5-year-old daughter was a gentle, curious soul. She still is, but, on that Friday morning, the one after Thanksgiving, she was fascinated by the wild geese congregating on the golf course outside the San Diego restaurant in which we had just breakfasted.
Knowing geese to be nasty creatures, according to my mother, who knew about these things (“geese are mean” is a direct quote), I leapt up upon a small retaining wall to startle them so that they would fly away and not be mean to my toddler daughter who insisted on toddling towards them. Silly me, I slipped and crashed onto the ground, breaking my left elbow in 5 places. The geese were certainly startled, and also rather amused.
Well, many years went by, and I began to lose feelings in my little finger on that left hand. Oh, the sensation of touch went away, but never my feelings of anger at the geese. So, along came a surgery called a cubital release to restore feeling, along with the release of the carpal and guyot tunnels. Be free, little finger!
To restore both feeling and movement to the finger, I just recently decided to take up playing the piano. In truth, I’ve returned to it, as it became impossible to play with the loss of feeling. Although my family will tell you I never played with any feeling at all.
So, in the garage do I have an Alesis keyboard given to me by my doting wife some twenty-five or so years ago. It’s a full-on synthesizer, and oy is it nice. Except the highest “A” key is broken and can’t be played, and it’s hugely heavy and requires either headphones or an amplifier to hear it. But it’s cool.
Alas, we already have a battered, out of tune upright piano in the house, so the lovely Alesis sits quietly in the garage.
But nowadays I play the upright so poorly that I dare not entertain the neighbors any more than I must, so I’ve set up the Alesis on the workbench in the garage.
It’s not that bad – I have two workbenches, and this one has carpet under it. Although my littlest dog has taken to using the carpet as the rainy-day restroom – solid matter, not liquid. Shovel the stuff out though we do, and shampoo as we oft have, it still retains just the slightest hint of puppy pooage. Still, a candle burning seems to chase it away.
You can’t stand and play the piano for very long unless you’re a rock star, so I dragged a tall stool over in front of it. Not tall enough, so I feel like a Muppet when I’m sitting there.
But, it plays, and I play, and we play together, and then my left hand gets sooooo tired, and the ring finger starts playing notes I’ve asked to not, and it gets kind of frustrating.
I thought maybe I would record my progress, and so hooked a Zoom recorder in between the keyboard and the headphones. Although my little Zoom had an SD card in it, for some reason it decided that it didn’t, and we argued about that for quite some time. Eventually I found the positively ancient Vivitar card reader that, surprisingly, had a bunch of those micro-SD card adapters, and one, just one, little tiny micro SD card.
Well. Between the dog poo smell and the muppet chair and fighting with the SD card, I began to lose a little steam. I mean, I do work for a living, and, well, this was supposed to be relaxing.
It’s funny how, when you’re just goofing around, you can play anything you want, but when you’re a little bit frustrated and perhaps a touch cranky and you’ve turned on a recorder, now you can’t play anything.
And now it’s late and the dogs want a walk and I still haven’t had dinner and my hand is really tired and, I mean, come on, you know?
Our job as writers is to write.
Well, I am here to tell you that, in order to save your sanity, just stick with it, and for heaven’s sake don’t take up the piano!
John D Reinhart 