I wish you could push me to stop procrastinating.

Hi Maria!

Thank you so much for providing these newsletters! All I can basically do is carry on - on and off - with the piano.

I've always tried to call myself .... "creative" ... and then I laugh! Then get sad. It's never been easy to get beyond the basics.

I'm a fine speaker and writer, and I'd like to think I'm musically someone who can make progress musically as well, but ...

I'm old now - when I was young, I played the trumpet in grammar school. We never got to the bass clef, only the treble clef. To this day, literally, over 60 years later, I can still kick out Lipstick On Your Collar, which was brand new back there in 1957!

But the piano, well, it's true I don't push myself. You're right there in my email, giving me the tools to do so. I'm a walking melody box of tunes encompassing almost every 19th and 20th century period ... all one-handed. I cannot play anything rhythmically - only one-handed melodies.

I can "find" any melody pretty quickly, kind of knowing "where" the major chords for it will be, but very very slowly, if even effectively. In the non-piano world, I'm a lefty with a talented right hand normally. I was a marvelous baseball lefty kid once. But the piano?

Well, it's just so defeating and difficult to rack my brains two-handed that I easily "lose" the time to try.

I wish you could just somehow push me - yell at me!! - to stop procrastinating and making excuses. Oh, it truly is too hard for me, it seems, but yes, I do need to pretty much stop everything else I love and make more of a commitment. I need a proper bench too. My wrists always hurt afterward, no matter how high I try to keep them.

Anyway, it's wonderful to know your whole piano world is there.

Thank you and thank you each time one of your automatic newsletters comes.

Sincerely,
Nick