The piano 2003-02-13 - 10:33 p.m.
I just sat at the organ and played "Greensleeves" over and over for twenty minutes. Granted it's one of the oh, maybe five songs I know how to play on any type of keyboard instrument. Yes indeed, piano for dummies taught me a whole lot. Ha. I guess if I had continued taking lessons I could be as good as a decent eighth grader now. But flute is my baby, and "Greensleeves" was my favorite thing out of Breeze Easy Book Two. I don't know what it is. Maybe the world stops for a little bit when you hear that piece?
Music does that sometimes.
Then I was thinking about playing that on my aunt's piano. Once it was sitting in her living room. There is a big ugly couch there now. Now it is in a musty downstairs catch-all room- rather out of place in her immaculate split level house. It hasn't been tuned in years. But I still sneak off to play it every Christmas. Away from the family din for a few minutes. Last Christmas they sat upstairs while I played. I overheard things.
"Why don't you give the piano to Sarah?"
Well, see, my aunt used to be really good at the piano. She used to be really good at a lot of things. To use a nebulous, overused term, she used to be perfect. Until her older daughter was born a little bit too soon after her marriage for her stuffy, conservative, Southern family to bear. Not so perfect any more.
Both my cousins had piano lessons when they were little. My aunt must have helped them sometimes. You know, the little girls with the Dorothy Hamill hairdos skipping off to their piano lessons before coming home to watch Scooby Doo.
Eventually, my aunt got arthritis in her hands. Or she just didn't want to play anymore. The piano sat untouched. Then it was moved downstairs toward a forgotten grave.
So, my aunt, after these years of neglect and a thirteen hour brain surgery to remove a massive tumor last month, probably couldn't sit and play even a simple arrangement of "Greensleeves" if she tried.
Perfection lasts only to a point.
So why should I expect anything extraordinary from myself? I only ever tried to be what everyone told me to be. As it turns out, I never figured out who I was. I never figured out what I'm doing here, besides going through the motions of existence. An incorrigible, clueless optimist, I always thought I'd figure things out tomorrow.
I will figure things out tomorrow. Just not tomorrow, per se. The world was not *really* created in six blocks of twenty four hours. That's just ridiculous (I would refer you to President Monkey here as being evidence of the good old-fashioned "missing link"). Granted God/Buddha/Allah/Mother Nature/R2D2/Ben & Jerry/Bill Clinton took the seventh "day" off for a couple of six packs and a stogie and a Monica You-know-who or two, but still. Maybe this seventh "day" is still going on. Maybe the Deity of your choice is still figuring things out. Maybe like Scarlett O'Hara and I, (S)He will "think about that tomorrow".
I have absolutely no idea what the purpose of this writing is. Other people are out doing very silly things right now *ahem*- see last entry. And yet, I'm sitting here, playing the organ, typing in this diary just for the sake of hearing the keys on this keyboard go clickety-clack, and quietly sipping this one lonely glass of vanilla Coke.
Wait a minute.
"Look ma, there's vanilla Coke in my rum!"
Where was I when the Normalcy Fairy was plinking everybody on the head with her magic wand, thereby making them happy and vapid and stupid and, well, normal?