Ed is off for 4 ½ days tomorrow to the other coast to attend a professional guardian association meeting. I will be enisled and have few opportunities to socialize unless one of the two people who might be available want to join me for a lunch and maybe a dip in the pool. But I am not holding my breath.

I will try to clean up some around here. Lots of stuff undone. I used to work on my own in New York, before entering the publishing world. My boss was a management consultant and traveled 99 percent of the time. I ran his office and prepared and mailed him the materials he needed to conduct management seminars. I had a radio on which I played classical music all day. I would sometimes make lunch dates. And I wasn’t lonely. That mindset stands me in good stead as I contemplate being on my own for the rest of the week.

Of course, it would help if I had my own car. I will have to be sure I get whatever I might need from the market tonight or go without.

I have been dipping my head into some difficult music – a piece that I studied, brought to a certain level, but because of the length and complexity never quite got to performance standard. I don’t expect to accomplish that even now – My focus is the Brahms-Handel Variations – oh me, oh my, talk about hard. But I am doing this because my repertoire has become too limited. That is not the way to grow. I’ll just focus on a variation here and there and try to make it really good and then, there is the fugue -- whew.

I’ve had a love affair with this piece since I was in my early 20s and had just bought a new Columbia Long-playing record player. It was an ambitious purchase considering my financial circumstances. It cost $300, and I bought it on time. A classmate at Chicago Musical College was studying it and I liked what I heard enough to buy the recording by Sascha Gorodnitzki, a truly wonderful pianist. For the first time I heard the whole thing. It was not easy to “get”. I put the needle back to start and listened a second time. I kept doing this that afternoon and after I had heard it about 12 times I was madly in love. Through the years I told myself that I would die happy if I could ever play it.

Well, that ain’t quite going to happen at the level I would like, but I have come so much farther with it than I ever thought I could, that I am happy. Sophie, too, was happy with the way I tackled it. She shepherded me through its intricate demands and showed me how to work it. That’s all one can ask. The only “problem” now is that I have to be patient. It is not where it was when I stopped working on it. Getting it back there will take months. And then, maybe, I can take it a step further. Ya gotta have goals. And again, I thank Sophie for giving me so much understanding into that world.

xx, Teal