Warm and Fuzzy Down in Austin

Thank you to the Heart of Texas Suzuki Organization for inviting me to teach at their weekend workshop again this year.  I got to teach 20 Book One and Two students masterclasses each day and give two parent lectures.

Lecturing feels so strange to me, because there are more than a few moments each day when I could use my own parent guru and there I stand the babbling idiot in front of fifty parents seeking insight. Getting it on the table from the get go--that I'm still looking for the answers myself, and that more than once I hauled my child off to his room screaming and kicking during practice (not lately--he's too heavy) and we have survived--is very liberating. We haven't just survived--we've come out of the room whole.  You can take a break but you always come back. We are in this for the long haul and we're going to have to learn from each other how to make it work.  I guess that is an important message.  You can screw up and still be in love with your kid and have him love you back. Perhaps that is why the parents at the parent lecture still took notes in spite of all my confessions.  Either that or it was free babysitting for an hour.

Teaching Book One and Book Two masterclasses is both easy and hard.  The goals are easy--get set up correctly at the instrument, have a little fun, and find the message in the music.  Implementing them in 15 minute snippets is hard. I've said it before--it feels like the final exams of teaching: here's the kid--show us what you can do. But thankfully it isn't an exam, it isn't about me, it is only about the child. Perhaps if we lessen our expectations from trying to give them some life altering information, to just trying to share a new game or idea, we will feel more successful.  Sometimes all you can do is plant a seed.

Can I just say, that coming back to Austin is such a blessing to me.  It feels a little like a This Is Your Life episode.  Virtually every college teacher I had is teaching at this workshop as well as my own Suzuki trainer Doris Harrel.  Again and again (mostly while watching the faculty recital) I have asked myself what the heck I'm doing here.  Why do they want me to teach next to these gods of collegiate teaching?  I don't feel worthy to make small talk at lunch.

Suddenly (again during the faculty recital) my value, my function, my role became clear to me in a little phrase of vocabulary:  perhaps I am their translator.  Perhaps I can take their musical message and translate it into pictures and words a child can understand and express.  I had these teachers under the pressure of full faculty juries--I know what their message is.  Young children deserve to hear that message and they can totally get it.  It just needs a little translating.  I can do that.

Back to the this is your life--my Austin student Kristen was there too.  Except she is all grown up and graduated and teaching Suzuki piano. She has fifty students and is hoping to get her own place soon. Congratulations Kristen!

She was my very first Suzuki student.  She and her brother Brian (who also showed up very tall at the dinner and is studying architecture at Texas A&M--to my feigned chagrin) were five and three when I started them in my apartment in Austin.  Whatever mistakes I made and I'm sure I made millions, she ended up loving it enough to make a life of it.  I consider that a success.  Love covers a multitude of mistakes and we don't have to be perfect to be of great value.

Thank you Mary, Janie, and the gang from HOTSO, I'm so thankful for y'all and your friendship.  Thank you Doris, Betty, David and my other teaching heros. Kristen, good luck and don't get a roommate if you can possibly afford it and don't teach piano in an upstairs apartment.  Brian, I'm fine with the architecture thing--but did you have to be an aggie?

I love you all.  Without you I would still be a girl with a boyfriend--playing in a rock and roll band.

Calvin Feeds a Child for a Year

We are wrapping up Christmas around here which includes finalizing Calvin's CD project.  We made and distributed around 60 CDs.  Some were gifts and some he sold for $5.  He collected $90 which he is donating to Feed My Starving Children.  According to their literature that will feed one child in Africa for twelve months.  Probably not Stonefield Farms organic yogurt, cantaloup and Pepperidge Farm's cinnamon bread--Calvin's foods of choice--but nonetheless.

Congrats Calvin!  Bill is going to take him over there (to the Eagan FMSC warehouse--not Africa) this weekend to hand over the cash in person.  Well done.

Fine print: In 2012  employees of Calvin's media are seeking union representation as their work rights around the holidays were infringed upon.  Future union negotiations will include a deadline of November 1 for the music to be recorded and December 10 for all production to be completed for distribution. If this deadline is not met the CEO of Calvin's Media hereafter referred to as John Calvin Kotrba will have to cut, fold, burn and laser copy his own CDs.  Signed: Mama and Daddy, chief operating officers of Calvin's Media.  

Lead Us Not Into Temptation

I am not tempted to commit adultery or murder or steal.  I am periodically tempted to compare myself, my children and my family to others.  Close friends are not immune to this.  There is always going to be someone working harder, in a better program, at a better school or on a more exclusive team.  Deal with it. After visiting with someone and learning how great their kids are at this and that and how advanced they are at blah blah blah, my knee jerk reaction is to come home and kick my own kids into shape.  So and so is doing such and such--you better work harder!

Lead us not into temptation.  I know better than to think this way.  I still have to stop and reflect.

We are born with only one obligation--to be completely who we are.  Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others. . . This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence.  Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger.  Yet when we compare ourselves to others, we see neither ourselves nor those we look up to.  Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening, pages 11-12.  

Left unchecked, the next step is to make ourselves feel better and the quickest and easiest way to do that is to diminish the object of our comparison.  Really--their program isn't that great--look how those kids are turning out--there must be something we can find wrong with them . . . see. . . they have pimples! 

I remind myself that I am the perfect parent for my children.  Our family experience is completely unique from any other family's experience.  As it should be.  As every family's life is. Yes, we can reflect and tweak our values from time to time, but the big picture is under control.

So, when we reflect, let us take motivation from the best of those around us, but lead us not into the temptation to compare our children.  A flower may not go to Harvard and a fish may not be a concert pianist and a tiger may not be a college athlete but let them be the very best flower and fish and tiger as they were created to be.

Claim Your Idiosyncrasies

Paster Sarah used this phrase at the end of her sermon on John the Baptist yesterday:  Claim your idiosyncrasies and use them for God.

I was really moved by those words.

A couple months ago I was visiting with someone about some random thing and off the cuff she said--Sara you know you're really weird.  She was totally joking, but still somewhere down deep it kinda stung.

Okay, so I'm really psycho about Mozart and incandescent lights and my house and the laundry. That is the short list. . . dig deeper and you might find that I want a simple life but I keep adding all these beautiful activities and houseplants and cats which complicate things.

How much effort do we and our children expend trying to cover up our idiosyncrasies and blend in.

Claim your idiosyncrasies.  Embrace your weirdnesses.  All the unique little things about us are actually what makes us not just beautiful, but useful.  Not in the same way as our neighbor, our friend, our relatives or our mother.  In our very own way.

What a great reminder.  Be yourself.  Be your very best self.  Claim your idiosyncrasies.  Help our young people claim theirs--and use them!

Getting from Here to There. . .

. . . with grace.

Big or small, there is always something we have to go through.

Sometimes getting from here to there can seem impossible.

The little Mozart doll in my studio is not pleased with the first week of lessons.  How are we going to get from this Mozart to something that is at least a little more like Mitsuko Uchida.  A little more grace.  It is not one student's performance I'm talking about. . . it is a whole crop of high school students who all described their Christmas break as "relaxing."  Obviously.  They relaxed. . .

So how to get them ready for an "honors" quality performance in three weeks.  Little steps and a whole lotta faith and obviously--some hours at the piano, please.  Slow practice.  Extra listening--the Uchida recordings I lent you would be a great place to start--but the key word--is to start!


You have no choice.  You are signed up. The money is paid. Put one foot in front of the other.

To put things in perspective, my friend had her daughter in the emergency room with pneumonia twice this week. When you are the mom and the child is sick, there is no choice. You have to go through it.  You have to get from here to there. Put one foot in front of the other.

And, my first reaction to learning about my dad's terminal cancer diagnosis was--okay--here we go. We don't have a choice. We can't run far away. We have to put one foot in front of the other.  Ditto on the funeral weekend.

So. It's only Mozart. Or in my case this week--loads of laundry, the ghost of Christmas chaos in the house and a stack of deadlines looming for chamber music, SPTG, and SAM.

Here is a radical idea:  perhaps we could do even better than just putting one foot in front of the other.  In her book Simple Abundance Sarah Ban Breathnach lists six principles to help us start the new year with more grace:

Gratitude

Simplicity

Order

Harmony

Beauty

Joy

Hmmm. . . let's see:  I'm so thankful that we have Mozart sonatas to work on. . . it takes a lot of work to make them sound simple. Order, harmony, beauty, and joy?  Those make it worth it to get from here to there.

It's only Mozart, but it is a little bit the same as life.  There are times when you have to get through it--but when you look back--you mostly want to see how grace filled it was--not just a stack of notes, tasks and days to get through.

After writing this, I'm ready to tackle my deadlines and my house now. I've put Mitsuko on my stereo.  I'm thankful I have deadlines and a house.  I'm working toward the other five--hopefully with just a little more grace.

The Journey to Fearless

"Mama, what is my thing?"  I want to be really good at something.  How can I be really good at piano when we always have these breaks?

These words out of the mouths of babes.  

Bill got Mary a DVD for Christmas, Taylor Swift's The Journey to Fearless.  It has live performances, but also interviews and footage of a little girl Taylor playing guitar and singing.  It says things like "she couldn't put the guitar down" and after she sang the national anthem at a big sports event the kids all made fun of her at school the next day.  It tells how she didn't have any friends because she was too busy practicing guitar.  

Then it flips to footage of her in the middle of the enormous arena singing in her sparkly dress with her sparkly guitar.  You get the point.  

You could just see the wheels turning in Mary's head.  A light went on.  Whatever it is that I want to be good at, I'm going to have to work very hard.  "Mama, I want a guitar."  We have a children's guitar upstairs, Mary, and you can pick it up whenever you want.  Mama I want to practice piano everyday.  Mama I want to see that concert live.  What she meant was:  Mama I want to be that good. . .. 

Nothing comes easy.  Not for Taylor Swift.  Not for Mary Ray.  Not for Sara Kotrba.  Everybody has to find what they love and work at it.  It is easy to be discouraged.  Bill took this short video of Mary trying to play guitar a few weeks ago.  Notice that she is having a great time, right up until the moment she has to change chords and she doesn't know the next chord.  Then she gives up.  Also notice that she had the right chord and she gave up anyway.  

The journey to fearless happens in very small steps.  Baby steps.  Learning one more chord.  Committing to practicing everyday for a month.  Making the steps doable and easy.  

Don't worry Mary, we're not giving up.  We'll will teach you the G7 chord so you can make it through Jingle Bells next time.   And I will do better at not taking breaks with piano, so that you can be your very best piano player too.  Starting today.

youtube link:  Mary's Guitar Medley

Another Year Has Gone By

I can barely believe that I have been blogging here for a year.  I have made 171 posts, and had 6500 visitors.  Writing here was one of the best parts of 2011 for me.  I thought I would write about scales and group lesson ideas and tips for having a great hand position at the piano, and while I do enjoy writing about those things, what I have loved the most is writing about my family, my faith (or lack thereof at any given moment) and the ups and downs of life.

New Year's Day in Texas was always a blue day for me.  The holidays were over and I missed my family and more often than not there was some disappointing Texas Dance Hall New Year's Eve gig hanging over my head.  The general routine was for me to be alone on stage at midnight playing Auld Lang Syne while the guys in the band all went out and danced with and smooched their sweeties.  Then --pack up, get in the car and get the heck out of there before the drunks figured out it was time to go home. For the six years I lived by myself in Austin--New Year's Day was a lonely day.

Fast forward thirteen years and now New Year's Eve is spent with treasured friends--talking, eating too much and watching our kids play.  Smooching my own hubby at midnight.

New Year's Day 2012?  Could I have a moment alone. . . . please???  Ten minutes alone?  What I wouldn't give to shower without interruption in my lonely Austin apartment. . . the grass is always greener.

Not really.  Family life is infinitely greener than living alone.  I'm thankful for the interruptions.  Oh the blessed interruptions. . . I'm thankful for my family and friends near and far, and I'm thankful for my husband, even when he interrupts me when I am trying to write. . . . ahem ahem. . .

For I have learned in whatever state I'm in to be content.  That might be Texas, or Iowa, or Minnesota.  It might be alone or it might be during the 20th interruption while I try to dry my hair.  But, today, New Year's Day, I'm thankful I'm not alone.  Here's to you Bill. . .

So many 25th's of December

Just as many 4th of July's

And we're still holding it together

It only comes down to you and I

I know that you can still remember

Things we said right from the start

When we said that this could be special

I'm keeping those words deep down in my heart

Another year has gone by

And I'm still the one by your side

After everything that's gone by 

There's still no one saying goodbye

Though another year has gone by

Recorded by Celine Dion--written by Bryan Adams and Eliot Kennedy. . I notice it came out in 1998--it was a very good year. . . here's a youtube link:
Another Year Has Gone By