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It’s not that I was a “whiz kid” or anything like that—my gift was for music!  The muses made their surreptitious entrance into my life on the same day an old fashioned upright piano  my father had purchased arrived at our house.  It had a dull black finish with some nicks and scratches on it, but I could have cared less. So what if it wasn’t brand   new? I wouldn’t have known the difference anyway.  After all, I was only five years old. 

As I pounded out my own version of the “Anvil Chorus,” it sounded great to me.  However, my parents had to find a piano teacher right away, in order to keep our neighbors from complaining that I was disturbing the peace.  They hired a teacher who made house calls in the afternoons after school.  I can still remember my first lesson.  My mother dressed me up to the nines, and as the teacher was coming up the sidewalk, my mother licked her thumbs and ran them over my eyebrows.

My new teacher was young and vivacious.  Each week she assigned me a new piece in the John Thompson Piano Course that she used for my lessons.  She had something called a “note finder” which was a square card with the musical staff printed on it.  It had a small black plastic quarter note that moved up and down by turning a scrolling bar on the left-hand side.  I practiced on my “new” piano with all of my heart and learned to read music very easily.  I was not playing Beethoven’s Sonatas yet but I was making excellent progress.  At the end of my first year of lessons I gave my first recital. I had practiced for hours beforehand and played each note perfectly, but I was sorely disappointed because my performance was over so quickly.