Music, Music Teachers, and Amazing Gifts

My piano teacher has the most amazing house. It is really more of a tiny house tacked onto a massive music room, which contains two full sized grand pianos and a massive organ. How she got them through the normal sized door I haven’t yet worked out. Maybe they built the room around the instruments? And added to that, she also owns two upright pianos, one in her shed, and one in her study. You can tell, just by looking at it, that a music teacher lives there.

Recently she announced that she was going to sell one of her upright pianos. After all, what use does one person have for four pianos, even when she is a piano teacher? After her husband, my former piano teacher, died last year, there just weren’t enough people to use them enough. It was perfectly understandable that she would sell one, though it was a pity. In my house we play on an electric piano, so her pianos are a real treat to play on every week at our lessons.

One day, she said, suddenly and unexpectedly, that she was going to give us the piano she had been planning to sell. My mouth dropped open. Give us a piano? Give us a PIANO? A piano is not something that you give away like that, not to my mind.

“You need a proper piano to play,” she said. “And Ian would have wanted you to have it too.”

I think about that, and I have to admit, it’s the sort of generous thing that both my teacher and her husband, Ian, would do. They’ve given us so much over the past few years, such as free piano lessons that we could never have afforded. To give us a piano is a big thing, and something I still can’t wrap my head around properly.

Soon the piano removalists are going to move the piano from my teacher’s house to ours. Soon the big, shiny, black piano will be sitting in our family room, it’s smooth white keys inviting me to sit down and press them, making beautiful music. I can still hardly believe how generous my teachers, both of them, have been. How could I deserve such a generous and unexpected gift?

Letters and Letter Writing

I have a box of letters under my bed. They’re folded neatly in creased envelopes, colourful stamps still attached, the product of months of letter writing between myself and a friend. They sit there, waiting for me to pick them up, read them through and remember when we wrote letters.

It’s been a long time since I wrote a real letter. I write messages to people over Facebook messenger. I write emails. Occasionally I talk over the phone to people. But I don’t write or receive letters, real letters written on paper and sealed in an envelope.

My sisters write letters sometimes. They write them on special paper and stick them all over with colourful stickers. It’s a big event, writing and sending a letter. They run out to the post box to check if the main man has brought them anything, and there are squeals of excitement when there are letters.

But letter writing seems to be so rare now. Most people seem to write emails, or text messages. Letter writing doesn’t happen very much any more. To me, that’s a great pity. It was a big job to write a letter and get a stamp and send it, and it took a few days to get a letter back, but there was always something so special about getting a physical letter. Having an email pop into my inbox doesn’t have the same thrill as ripping open the back of an envelope.

There’s something special about writing a letter. There’s something special about receiving a letter. Letter writing is special art. I hope it doesn’t die out completely.

Krypton, Kryptonite, and Chemistry Lessons

My sister Charlotte loves chemistry. She reads books about the elements, watches chemistry videos involving crème Easter eggs, and has a random, but interesting fact about most, if not all of the elements.

In contrast, I was never very good at chemistry, despite once wanting to be a doctor. I liked the videos, but the theory was very much beyond me. It was as much as I could do to remember the names of the first six elements on the periodic table. Biology was fun. Chemistry…not so much.

One Christmas, Charlotte received a puzzle as one of her gifts. And, being the chemist of the family, it was a full colour puzzle of the periodic table of elements, complete with illustrations. One thousand pieces big, it was the perfect puzzle for a brainy girl like herself.

I wasn’t the brainy chemist, but I was the puzzle champion. Who else had the patience to put together a one thousand piece puzzle consisting of nearly identical sweets? So the moment the chemistry puzzle came out, I was there to help. True, I didn’t know the first thing about most of those elements, but I was good at puzzles. And that had to count for something, right?

“Which is this element?” I asked Charlotte, holding up a puzzle piece. It was a silver coloured element, not that that helped. Over half of them seemed to be silver.

She squinted at it and then said with complete certainty, “Tungsten.”

“But the symbol is W,” I protested. Tungsten didn’t begin with that letter. Even I knew that much.

“It’s the first letter of its name in German,” she said, before placing the piece in the right area of the periodic table.

Finding the right place on the periodic table was a problem for me too. Ok, so I knew where some of the elements went, like Carbon and Helium, but where did Gallium go? Or Manganese? With unfailing patience, Charlotte directed me to the right places. Doing this puzzle was harder than I thought it would be. But at least I was learning something. Working on the puzzle with Charlotte was like having a chemistry lesson, only better.

Hang on, here was an element I knew. I pulled the piece out and cried, “Hey, I found Kryptonite.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Silly. Kryptonite isn’t an element. It’s made up. That’s Krypton and it’s a noble gas. Goes on the right side of the periodic table.”

Oops. Silly me. I should have known that Superman's greatest weakness wasn't a real element. I guess I still have a lot to learn about chemistry.

Jars of Failed Jam

A friend of ours gave us a huge bag of crabapples one day. These were little fruits, the size of a cherry, but much tarter, and not so nice to eat raw. It was very nice of her to give these to us, but the question was, what were we to do with them?

There appeared, after long and careful thought, to be only one thing to do with these crabapples, and that was to turn them into crabapple jelly, which is basically jam. No matter that we hadn’t made jam before in our lives. Armed with a recipe off the internet, a bag full of crabapples and one of sugar, we set out on our big jam making adventure.

We boiled the crabapples and added copious amount of sugar. We stirred, and tried not to burn anything. We burnt ourselves, strained things, melted plastic jar lids by mistake, and generally turned the kitchen into a big, sticky mess. But, at the end of our labours, four jars of crabapple jelly sat cooling on our countertop. And we were quite proud of that. Very soon they were be cool and would have jelled and we would have crabapple jelly to eat. Mmm. We licked our lips in anticipation.

Obviously not my jam. But it does make me wonder, what is frog jam? It sounds suspicious...

Only, they didn’t jell. No matter how long they cooled, no matter how anxiously we tested those jars of jam, they wouldn’t turn into that beautiful jelly we had imagined. Still, we could always use it as ice cream topping or something of that sort. With a sigh, we pushed the jars into the back of the fridge. And there they stayed. Nasty, oversweet, yet somehow still slightly bitter, they were everything that jam should not be. For a long time they sat there until at last we threw those four jars away, hardly touched, and soon to be thankfully forgotten.

It seems that jam making is quite an art. Maybe it needs special skills. Or maybe it’s a thing that only certain people have the good fortune to be able to make. I don’t know. But if there’s one thing that I learnt from this it’s that jam making is hard work. Maybe I’ll just stick to buying my jam rather than making it. At least then it is certain to be jam and not a sticky, gloopy mess.

Infant Incident

When I was a baby, I was abandoned soon after birth. Oh, not out on the streets, or on the doorstep of some nameless orphanage somewhere in the slums. Nothing quite so fairy tale as all that. No, I was abandoned in a hospital.

In my hospital, the nurses took babies away to have their photos taken. Mine hangs in pride of place on the wall, with my little squished baby face peering into the camera, a blanket wrapped tightly around me and my tiny hands pinned near my face by the blanket. My nurse took me away to have this photo take while my mum stayed in bed. The nurse promised to bring me back later.

Time passed. I didn’t come back. Mum got worried. Where was the nurse with her baby? Like all good mothers do, she hopped out of bed and went in search of her little lost baby, hunting through the hospital. What had the nurse done with me?

A terrible quality photo of me. the very same taken on that fateful day

After an anxious hunt, there I was, lying in my hospital baby bed, abandoned by the nurse. I don’t know where in the hospital I was. I don’t know where the nurse went after my photo was taken. Maybe she left me somewhere safe. Maybe she needed to run off and do something before she brought me back. Maybe she simply forgot that I needed to be taken back. But, whatever the reason, I was the little abandoned baby in the hospital, who mother came to find her.

Looking at my sisters, my mother and I, you can tell we’re related. We’re far too much alike to be anything else. There’s no chance that we’re not from the same family. But sometimes, with a mischievous grin, I tell people, “I was abandoned as a baby,” and tell my tale.

How Homeschooling Helped Prepare Me for University

I was a homeschooler. Every day of my school life, right from day one, I was taught at home with my brothers and sisters. We read Shakespeare’s plays together for fun, we read books and we studied paintings together. And honestly, I wouldn’t have gone to school if you’d given me the choice. Homeschooling was amazing fun. I couldn’t imagine anything better.

But as I got close to the end of my high school homeschooling days I started to wonder, was I going to be ready for university? Did I have the skills that I would need when I started formal learning with a set curriculum? My form of homeschooling didn’t involve textbooks and writing essays on every imaginable, boring subject under the sun. How was I going to cope? Would I be better prepared if I’d been to school?

Well, I don’t know if I’d have been better prepared if I’d been to school, but I was certainly prepared enough through homeschooling. The course I wanted to do is all online, which meant no travelling to tutorials, sitting in long lectures, and travelling on the train every day, which in my mind was great. And because it is a university course, there is no one looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do each day for my work, like a teacher would in a lesson at school.

Homeschooling is so flexible that it allows you the space to learn a lot of skills, both formal and informal. There’s time to work on writing, which is good preparation for essays, even if you’re not writing essays for your school work. For my very first NaNoWriMo I spent most of my school time just writing, because I could. I was homeschooled.

And homeschooling allowed me the space to learn how to work on my own. With so many people of different abilities, you have to go and work on your own at some point while Mum’s attention is with another sibling. And you had to work with people of different ages for some things, just like in university.

Of course, there were difficult things, like submitting assignments to a due date. In our homeschooling there had never been a need for that. And maybe I’d have been more used to that if I went to school. But, thanks to being able to work on my own, I adjusted quickly, and didn’t miss anything. And maybe not being used to submitting on a date was good for me because it meant that I knew I had to be careful not to miss the date and made me work hard so that I hit it early.

I don’t know if I’d have been better prepared for university had I gone to school, but I do know that homeschooling definitely gave me a good start. And when you’re working towards a degree you really want, like I’m working towards a degree in writing and publishing, then you’re willing to work hard to get there.

Guest Posts: Beg, Borrow and Steal

We’re sitting round the table, talking about the Blogging Challenge. “What are you going to write about for the letter ‘G’?” Mum asks.

“No idea.” I haven’t got a clue as to what my G post is going to be about yet.

“You should get a Guest Post for today’s letter. You could always ‘borrow’ one. ‘Guest’ begins with a ‘G’ after all,” Mum jokes.

“You could make a theme out of that,” Callum said. “’Borrowed Post’ for B. ‘Pilfered Post’ for P.”

“’Stolen Post’ for ‘S’. “Thefted Post’ for ‘T’. Hmm, maybe a bit clunky. Still, a theme like that would make things so easy.” I grin at the thought

"'Taken Post' maybe?" Charlotte suggests. "And how about 'Filched' for F?"

We laugh. If only things were that easy. But no, stealing posts won’t work sadly. Somehow I don’t think that that would be an acceptable theme. I think I’ll have to stick to writing my own posts instead of stealing from other people, which would be bad. Still, I wonder, is it possible to make an A-Z out of words for Begging, Borrowing and Stealing blog posts? That would be something interesting to try.