Humble Heroes

Everyone Needs an Expensive Frustrating Hobby, Don't They? 

Mark Humphrey is My Hero

Restringing in Progress

Second Day of Eighth Grade

Shiny New Strings and Pins and Bright Red Felt

Good to Go For Another 50 Years

Aren't They Shiny? 

Still Some Work to Do 

No More Teflon in the Under Levers

Somebody Hand Makes This 

Did You Know You Can Dust Under the Plate with an Air Compressor? 

Friday Night Football was Played Before and After the Half Time Show

First Day of His Senior Year 

We are off and running. School started Tuesday and I start teaching this next week.  It's a good idea to start lessons a week after school starts. For the children and for me. It gives us all just a little breathing room.

Life moves at several different paces. Highs and lows? A twelve-year-old brought a loaded gun to the junior high I grew up in, where my mom taught for 30 years and where my sister currently teaches. He attempted to shoot my sister's friend Dawn Spring. He fired the gun but the safety was on. Then she said, quote of the year, "it looks like you are having a really bad day, lets go talk to someone." And she accompanied him to the guidance counselor's office where they disarmed him. Sometimes the angels show up at the right time. We didn't really want Eldridge on the map. Dawn is a humble hero.

My friend Kris is in the hospital with viral meningitis and Ramsay Hunt disease in her ear. That's shingles. She's been very, very ill and the church is postponing her goodbye party. We hope she will come home as soon as possible. More room for angels, every kind nurse and creative doctor is appreciated.

Mary is making jewelry out of the old piano strings and pins. Mark has been here all week putting new strings and dampers on the Steinway. He is an artist and the hero of my pianos. The piano was built in 1970 and has the original strings and dampers. The next time they get replaced it will not be by me. Isn't that something. Pianos are something else.

Everyone seems to be in the right place at the right time. Isn't that all we really need? I'm teaching teachers Suzuki Book Five this Fall and believe me, it's a little intimidating. Who would really want to take this from me? I've taken the class from Doris Harrel and just having her Steinway does not qualify the teaching. Still, I didn't do this because I think I'm worthy. I did the teacher training thing because I believe in the mother tongue approach and talent education.

In The Book of Joy, Archbishop Tutu says on page 210-211, "Sometimes we confuse humility with timidity, this gives little glory to the one who has given us our gifts. Humility is the recognition that your gifts are from God, and this lets you sit relatively loosely to those gifts. Humility allows us to celebrate the gifts of others, but it does not mean you have to deny your own gifts or shrink from using them. God uses each of us in our own way, and even if you are not the best one, you may be the one who is needed or the one who is there."  I'm clinging to that. . . we don't have to be the best one to be of value. Whenever we are at the edge of our ability and experience there will always be doubt. The author goes on to remind the reader that it's not about me. It's about the message, in this case the joy of teaching book five. Except the Haydn. . . I'm not quite getting the joy of that first movement yet.

Back to The One Thing and I'm sorry you are victims to my current reading list, after the blog you will not need to read the actual books. . . but, in keeping with the goal of blocking time for my one thing, I'm committed to practicing two hours a day this Fall. I'm off to a very good start and it feels very good to play. The author says you need to block fours hours a day to your one thing, but he doesn't have two kids and a studio and a home and garden and a church job. I humor myself.

Other heroes of the week? High school calculus teachers who buy the textbooks THEY want with their own money.  Middle school GT counselors who sneakily get readers the right English teacher. The entire Eastview Band department. Husbands who run errands on Saturday morning so wives can blog. Pretty much everyone one who goes to bat for someone else, sacrificing something of themselves along the way, is a humble hero.