Moonlight Sonata

This is what greeted me a minute or two after I woke to take my antibiotic this evening.



It was one of the first pieces I tried to learn when I bought my piano in 1976, because the opening movement is slow and forgiving. I was to the point where grace was beginning to infiltrate that section, when I met and married the children's father, and my piano went into storage for three and a half years. I'd taken a stab at beginning to learn the second movement, but the third and final movement was far beyond my ability, even though I could type over 100 words per minute back then.

I tend to learn physical skills slowly. Witness: killing the engine seventeen times in front of the babysitter's house with her father watching, when I was learning to drive a stick-shift. Or the hours and hours I practiced the one simple line dance I know while washing dishes, and how gleeful I felt when I was finally able to integrate a spin into the stepping-backward part. And then teach others to dance it.

I like to learn physical things when there's no one else around to see me fail. I think this may be the dregs of the shyness I felt as a child, before I discovered how amazing and wonderful people can be. And I think part of it dates back to high school, when the jocks would stand around the trophy case and "rate" the girls as they walked by. (I was never a 10, in case you were wondering, and by my senior year I would go far out of my way to avoid walking past the trophy case, even if it meant walking the length of one hall, outside in my shirtsleeves in freezing weather, and back down the next hall for a class that was 50 yards or less from the class which preceded it.)

But I digress. Notwithstanding my present inability to play it, I love that third movement of the sonata. It's a musical snapshot of what it feels like to be me: the holy fire, the refusal to be silenced, the grit. So many church guys were intimidated or downright terrified. I'm so grateful that Beloved was brave enough to warm his hands at my heart.