Still Lovely

I've started to practice the piano again after many many years of neglect. I had piano lessons for several years as a child, on the very same old upright piano that I sat down at today. The same piano my mother and aunts learned on in the 1920s. It's a player piano, also known as a pianola or automated piano, the kind with pedals and paper music rolls. When I closed up my parents' house, I had it sent out here from Massachusetts.

Miss Bessie Thayer, a very proper old Bostonian lady who took in boarders, taught many of the neighborhood kids. She was short and soft and had very white hair in braids pinned up on her head, and I had a terrible crush on the mysterious man who rented her downstairs room. This photo reminds me of her somehow. I didn't learn a thing about the soul of music, but Bessie Thayer sure taught me to read, and, man, she taught me to count! Two things that, to my amazement, I can still do. And I still don't know anything about music, how it's put together, how it works. But I can sit down and play what's in front of me, and I enjoyed the heck out of figuring out a song this afternoon.