Music with Mom

She may not love walking ten minutes to see a wild swan, but she has the patience of a saint trying to teach her mother to play guitar.
When it started, I was the one teaching her. The little brat had the audacity to surpass me within a month, and now, I strum in her dust as she disappears down the road to musical prowess.

Some days, my fingers and brain momentarily unite, and I am able to do the arduous finger picking. I am usually pretty good at the chords, at least the ones I know. But we just reached the sixth string notes, with little black symbols denoting which note to play dancing two or three lines below the staff! How is anyone supposed to remember what those low liers are? I can name any note on the staff, but you start sending them over or under those five lines, and you have reached the limits of my memory. I am brought close to tears by my inability.

"You're doing good!" croons Asherel, when I have played one out of 20 correctly and all haltingly, painfully slow. I don't correct her and tell her it should be "well" not "good" because neither is true in this case.

Finally, I put the guitar down, and tell Asherel, "I just can't keep up. Honey, I am slowing you down. You really need to just practice on your own. I may get this....someday....but it will take me forever. You could be sailing by me, learning twice as much as you are when waiting for me."
"That's ok," she said, "It helps me to teach you."
"But Asherel, you are taking lessons so you will learn to play guitar. Why do you want to have to go so slowly when you are a natural talent, and can go so much guickly?"
"Because I like learning it with you. It's not as much  fun alone."

I have to say, this statement reverberated in my head all night. Here I am wishing my two grown kids would want to do something, really anything with me while this sweet girl actually wants to creep like molasses through her guitar lessons so that she can do them with me. I am scum.... a mindless blob of stupid, insensitive scum. Do you ever feel like that?

So I will practice on my own every day just a little so that those horrible low notes that for no good reason I can discern parade right off the staff. And I will thank God for a daughter who may not see the beauty of a 5 mile walk....yet..... but does see the beauty of making music with Mom.

Ephesians 6: 1-3

 ¹ Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ² “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— ³ “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

The Notes fall in place

As the guitar teacher and Asherel were strumming together, the marmalade cat added his discordant "meow!" He was clearly not musical, being several notes off-key.

The cat had wandered into the backyard studio, and then made himself the object of attention as desperately as he could. He had one mangled ear, healed now but clearly chewed off in some altercation.

"Hi Taylor," said Lenny the teacher, unable to ignore the cat's unmelodious mewing.
"Did he lose his ear in a fight?" I asked.
"Probably," said Lenny, "He is the neighbor's cat and it was that way when we met him. But he does terrorize my cat so I wouldn't doubt it."

The cat climbed into the guitar case, and mewed again, begging me to resume scratching him behind his ears. Asherel strummed and I scratched. And mosquitoes buzzed, having been reincarnated in the suddenly humid warm days of Indian Summer. Lenny smacked one right in mid strum.
"You could at least do that on beat," I said.
"I was never a drummer," he told me.

It was one of those happy little vignettes of life that had arrived by a miraculous confluence of events, engineered, I am convinced, by the Master Engineer. Asherel had won an art contest last year that entitled her to a free art class with Community School of the Arts. (CSA) Since I don't own a pottery wheel, she had signed up for a class that taught Clay-making with the Pottery Wheel. Sadly, the school called me when class was about to begin to tell me that registration had been dismal this year, and the class was canceled. But she offered me to choose another class.

Meanwhile, Asherel and I were attempting to learn how to play guitar together. I play a little, enough to get us started, and we had been slowly working our way through basic chords. Asherel still laughed every time we played the Beatles song, "Rain", not convinced that my rather sorry singing and playing was optimal. However, we are maxed out on funds for extracurricular activities, and while not ideal, I could teach guitar, at least as well as I teach Algebra 2.

"There are no other art classes she is interested in," I told the CSA representiative, " I am an artist myself and have taught her or can teach all the other areas you offer in art."
"How about a music class?" she asked.
"Do you have guitar lessons?"
"Yes, but he teaches out of his home, not here."
She gave me the address. It was 5 minutes from me.  A free semester of guitar lessons and 5 minutes away.

So it didn't even matter if we didn't like Lenny- he was free and close by, and he couldn't be worse than me in teaching guitar. But lo and behold, Lenny is a stupendous guitarist and a gentle and a kind man that knows Beatles songs by heart! When he heard Asherel was a Beatle groupie, he immediately taught her a song to practice. And while she picks out the tune laborious note by laborious note, he is so skillful that he can accompany her and it sounds like a concert.

So the cat and I, sitting in the waning afternoon sun streaming in the open studio door along with the mosquitoes listened .  Some people might only have heard stumbling plucking strings and soft accompanying chords, but I heard the hand of God arranging every note of a precious life.

Jeremiah 1:5 (New International Version)

 ⁵ "Before I formed you in the womb I knew  you,
       before you were born I set you apart;