Bookwise I remain difficult to please. I started C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" the other day and got halfway through it, then quit. It's not a bad book - in fact, it's quite good - it's just that I didn't feel like reading it. Besides, I'm almost positive I read it in a class I took in college.So now I'm reading a book that has been on my shelf for nearly 29 years, Edward Abbey's "The Journey Home - Some Words in Defense of the American West," a kind of travelogue. My wife bought it before we married and, casting about for easy reading material, I put it on my "to read" shelf. I'm halfway through. It reads somewhat like one of those hobo books I was reading earlier this year. (Yes, the author did describe some boxcar rides.)
Some interesting text he wrote about Death Valley is here.
Rugby practice for the fifteens season begins tonight. (Fifteens is real rugby - not the feeble, seven-a-side version that's played in Summer.) I have been telling myself for a month or two that I'd show up and take part for some of it, just to get some jogging in - I haven't run in years. Problem is, however, I don't really want to. It's easy to talk yourself out of attending rugby practice - it's time-consuming, tiring and often hurts - but that's not really it. It just seems too much like retracing a road I've already travelled, or revisiting a place I've already been to.
Problem is, I'm bored, and am in one of those wretched transitional phases of my life. I have no real interests right now and life seems tedious. But, in the same way I used to look at a soccer field and wonder if I could play two 40 minute halves of rugby upon it, or listen to a bass line and wonder if I could play it in a song, or consider jogging around Burke Lake to prepare to run a marathon, I have something else on my mind.
When I was seventeen, deeply interested in classical music, I took piano lessons. I was progressing moderately well with little effort when I made the decision to enlist in the Marine Corps. That took the focus away from my piano lessons and so I quit. Besides, I never came to terms with the music theory aspect of it, and told myself that I couldn't memorize the notes to do sight reading of music.
Looking back upon it, I gave up way too easily on things when I was a kid.
However I'm older and wiser, now, with more confindence and self discipline thanks in part to the Marine Corps and having made it though tough engineering classes in college. In other words, I have a better understanding of what I'm capable of.
Lately I've begun to think that I ought to once again take piano lessons and make more headway with it than I did as a teen. The interest in classical music is still with me - in fact, it's been one of the constants in my life - and lately when I hear piano music I find myself wondering, "Could I learn to play that?"
There's a friend of ours in church who used to give piano lessons... she and her family are on vacation now, but I'll ask her about it.
Another Army Band concert will be held tonight at Kenmore School, so the decision I have before me is rugby or music?
Rugby or music?
4 comments:
I say music. I am a rugger, however, there will be a time when I will have to quit rugby and I will have to find another interest. I think you have found that other interest in classical music.
The other consideration is that I'm 53. Just how long am I going to play rugby?
Earth lost the great Les Paul yesterday.
Make it music.
My old piano teacher doesn't recognize me anymore, but everytime I visit her in the nursing home she is surrounded by folks begging her to play. Happily, she retains the ability.
There's more than a piano lesson in that.
constant reader...
Why not Rugby AND music? You of all people could swing it. Seems these days, everybody I know has a piano in their house but NOBODY in the household can play. Don't be that guy.
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