Pianika

Later on I am taking this around to a friend's house. I kind of remember when our daughter got it in her first year at elementary school. Kids in Japan use these to learn music, they use the Do Re Mi approach. There should be a tube to blow into the thing and produce a little mouth organ type sound, that got lost. When these things emerge from the archaeological collection of past possessions they seem to light up a great swathe of intervening time that passed very quickly. I suppose it is not such a huge amount of time in reality, but the changes that happen within it make it seem so.
I retained almost no knowledge of music at school, but these days I am growing happier with it and a lot of that comes from finally understanding something of the logic behind the simple structure of the keyboard. It was interesting the other day when someone came to stay, they asked me to teach them something about how to play the piano. The simple stuff is easy to explain and it was nice to see how having some simple rules to rely on made them more comfortable. I do wish some of that had been on the curriculum back when I was wearing shorts in winter. Wishing won't make it so. I am endeavoring to catch up more than thirty years down the road in the newfound knowledge that it is actually my right to have fun making some noise.