Learning to Read

Do you remember, way back when you were a child, what it was like learning to read? First, you had to learn the building blocks of language, letters, which are really just squiggly lines jotted down on some flat surface. Then, once you thought you were doing well and had a solid grasp on their appearance, somebody (a teacher, I reckon) told you that the shapes were associated with sounds, so you had to go back and learn the sound that was joined at the hip to each squiggly line.

The next layer of complication arose when the individual letters were mashed together to create words. And to make matters worse, there were a bunch of crazy rules you had to learn too! Like people, these letters behaved differently depending who their neighbors were! The Mr. S at the beginning of the word ‘session’ has quite a different attitude and sound from the same sss (esses?) residing in the middle. Once you had those down, you threw the words together to create sentences. Add a touch of grammar and some punctuation for good measure, and voila! So easy a child can learn it! Thus the entire of world of literature was opened before you, and now, as an adult, reading seems like the most natural thing in the world.

So where, exactly, am I going with this? Good question. Tonight, I felt a little bit like the incompetent child sitting in front of his flashcards all over again. I had the first piano lesson of my life.  When I first sat down, I may as well have been a German code breaker listening to the Navajo. The expanse of white keys, interrupted on occasion by black ones, extending as far as the eye could see in either direction was enough to start my head spinning. We started out by reading music, and I was introduced to the bass clef. We sat for 20 minutes as I tried to read aloud the name of each note in several little pieces, and draw the mental line to the key on the instrument. Easier said than done. Next week it will be Chopstix and Chopin.

The goal of all of this is, of course, to be able to read music as fluently and easily as you’re reading this right now. I suppose at some point it will click, become second nature, and I will look back at these struggles with an amused chuckle and slight shake of the head.

Well, that’s it for tonight folks! Until next time, rest easy and illegitimi non carborundum!