The previous post is connected to my beginnings in that I never had goals. I never foresaw having what I now have. I’m deeply appreciative, but it was not part of any plan.

When my mother asked if I wanted piano lessons, I was in kindergarten. At age three, I had received a toy piano that I played incessantly. In those days, there were car radio and air conditioning dashboards that resembled keyboards and I was constantly playing on them. The other factors to my musical start were that my grandfather was the minister at a Muscogee Indian Church called Salt Creek. It was in the country near Yeager, and near the land where my family had lived since the Trail of Tears. All the services were in Muscogee and I was related to almost everyone there. My first babysitter, Hettie Long, was the church pianist, and I would sit where I could see her fingers going into the keys. I was rather obsessed. Luckily, someone had gifted an upright piano to my grandfather. He died when I was four years old, and the piano was moved to our house.

My first piano teacher was 15 years old and I was her very first student. At the local high school, Ma was a secretary’s aide. I’m not sure why she was never an official secretary. She befriended a girl named Cindy, whose parents were older and did not have much money. Cindy was kind and finding her way as a teacher. The best thing she did for me was to start me on music theory lessons in kindergarten. She gave me a theory coloring book that I have to this day. I’ll try to post it later. We then began seven years of loving music. I played Bach, Clementi, Chopin, Debussy, Barry Manilow, movie themes—pretty much everything. I didn’t learn to perfect pieces, but I learned that music was my great connection to the universe and it made me happier than anything. It was my private world of happiness. It still is, and I’m trying to understand how it became so outward without my noticing.