With the Furniture

In the midst of a University Assessment Committee meeting yesterday, I looked at my hand resting on the table in front of me and had this strange new thought:

That's a nearly forty-year-old piece of equipment. (My hand, not the table.)

Not long before the meeting, I had been practicing some Liszt pieces I've known for a while. More and more, I enjoy playing works I've know for a while. My hands and arms appreciate moving through familiar patterns and producing combinations of sounds that they figured out how to produce comfortably some time in the past.

I have very few machines that are forty years old and still function. But much of my furniture is at least that old. Maybe that's part of why we appreciate older things as we age: we start to belong with the antiques in that they have a few years on them but are still sturdy and functional. They're even a little elegant which might inspire us. They're a little more human in these ways than some of our newer things - gadgets that will be displaced and replaced in a few years.

And there's something else I have that's a little old like me: music. I play stuff that's stood the test of time and spoken to the human heart, in some cases, for centuries. Thinking about that makes me want to play something really old - millenia old, not just centuries.

That's where I am - at home with my old stuff and my old self.

And my beagle. She and her ilk have also been hanging out with humans for a long, long time. And I think I can sense her passion for her human family in her greetings and her desire for quality time with us.

Paul, my personal apostle, (I'm referring to Dr. Paul Harlan my colleague at Southeastern who designed the theory curriculum I teach) reminded me that the extraordinary difference between the machine of my hand and the clothes washer that no longer works is that the hand is made of human tissue that rebuilds and refreshes itself. It's kind of a miracle when you put it in those terms.

It occurs to me that the aging of the hands and the mind were not particularly addressed in my musical education. The health of the hands was in a big way, but there was no intentional discussion of what happens or might happen as one grows older.