Blogging again....at least I'll try...

Believe it or not, I actually have had several persons ask me to start blogging some again. So, I will. Just to let you all know, I do have another blog going, written for the pastors (I almost write MY pastors...I hope that would not sound too possessive or maternal....).
That URL is www.heartlandnorthnews.blogspot.com.

Right now, I am watching Sarah Palin ...Cana came in and shouted to me as I was playing "He Hideth My Soul" on the piano "It's The Lady speaking!!!" and so .... well, I probably will have more to say about the election sometime, but not tonight.

I was playing on the piano I currently have...an older not-so-great spinet that belongs to Rockbridge Christian Church in Columbia where the Kawai grand Philip and I still co-own is. There is more to the story of course but it is long and laborious. ANYWAY, Philip informed me a couple of weeks ago that because I was playing so much nowadays, I needed a decent piano. And so, I began looking at the "musical instruments" section of craigslist. And lo and behold, I found a Yamaha studio piano for a reasonable price and it is coming to live with us on Friday. That's the very piano that is coming home to us that's in the picture. I am happy.

Mostly I play arrangements of hymns. Sometimes some Joplin and Gershwin. I am an "intermediate to advanced intermediate" pianist. I thank my parents who didn't listen to me in fifth grade when I would yell about having to practice every day. And I thank Bill McGuire, my piano teacher. Bill is the son of David and Fern McGuire, who owned and operated McGuire's Orchards for years south of Carbondale Illinois in Makanda. It was the McGuire Orchard through which you have to pass to get to the oak grove that gives the name to Oak Grove UMC, my home church. Bill is a wonderful man, who seems eternally young to me. His main piano studio, and where I played recitals, is in Anna Illinois. I spent several VERY nervous Sunday afternoons there waiting to play Massenet or Beethoven. He would come to our house to give lessons, and we had a chair, with a rattan back and and low seat, that became "Bill's Chair" for both my brother's and my piano lessons and which stayed "Bills' Chair" long after we stopped taking lessons and which I wish we had not sold. I took lessons for six years--the last two years, Bill would come very early Monday mornings to give me lessons and then drive me to school in his car or cars, which I think was a Cadillac. I may have written about Bill before---at our small Methodist church, Bill would play Chopin etudes for preludes and offertories. He would play McDowell, and Beethoven, and more Chopin. I thought every church had classical music and as good a pianist as Bill. Bill played for the funerals for both my parents. He came with a friend one time to our house in Kirkwood and listened to me play a piano arrangement of "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" on the Kawai and beamed. He advocated vitamin supplements before they became fashionable. He sold Shaklee and he may still. He used to say to me when I kept messing up a measure or two "no, No, NO Susan", but there were many more kind words than "nos." There were some days, especially when I first started taking lessons, when the two dollars that my folks paid a week for my lessons were hard to find for them. Bill would take whatever they could give on those days.

And now I have the gift of being able to play for my own enjoyment (though not always my kid's enjoyment) because of the conspiracy of music Bill McGuire and my parents plotted against me. I don't know much about how music effects the brain, but I know it does...I get up from playing a half hour with a new spirit and mind often. I am grateful.