play it again

The minute we moved into this house, my mother-in-law was hatching a plan.  Nope, not to organize the kitchen or to help decide what color to paint the living room.

For a piano.

She had even gone as far as to say that if we were to find one on the internet, she'd help with the cost or pay entirely if the cost was more than reasonable.

Months go by and we don't have much luck.

Word gets around that Jon used to play piano as a kid...gee, I wonder who let that out....and even our church's director of music and her husband jump on the "get a piano" bandwagon. I figure when it happens, it happens.

We don't cross paths with our friends for a few weeks; we're away for various reasons and so are they.  But a week and a half ago the wife comes to us with a "surprise".

Turns out that the church property in the city we moved from is for sale.  And there are not one, but two pianos in the building.  And our church friends are on the district advisory board that oversees the sale of this property and the eminent disposal, sale or donation of all items left on the premises.

The piano is ours if we want it.

Jon and his brother took the van last Saturday afternoon and brought the piano home.  I didn't even really care at first; not for myself, anyway.  Caleb wants to take lessons so that he can play drums in middle school and Matthew asked if he could take lessons too.

Fine.

You know how sometimes you didn't even know you wanted something until you get it?  Yep, that's me.

I play enough to be able to sight read the treble clef for sure; bass clef is a bit rusty. (I sing soprano, in case you didn't know.)  I can tell you that I know I got to the end of  'Teaching Little Fingers to Play', but then never went on to the First Grade book.

I regret that now, I tell ya.  Turns out my Mom was right.  Again.  Dang. ahem...

But I have had fun this week taking our church hymnal and plunking things out.  And the boys are enjoying taking lessons from a copy of the same book that I used and I'm sure Jon actually used.  I know his brother Jason played from that book, because his name is written on several pages.  And some cousins of our boys used the book too.

The piano is in desperate need of a tuning, but we have that scheduled for Wednesday of next week.  We found a guy in the next town over and his rate was even less than we had expected.  And of course, my in-laws have graciously covered the cost of getting the piano tuned.

I'm warning you right now.....don't be surprised if videos of lessons start showing up here!

**there's no picture for this post because it would seem that my camera is AWOL.  Hopefully it didn't decide to find a place to die.**