Jane Doe, Alive and Well

I really like music; all kinds of music.
I even played music when I was younger. In fact, I was the “first chair” flute player in my junior high (did I mention I went to a really small junior high?), until that rich new girl who took private lessons came to our school and beat me in tryouts. I’m pretty sure much of my emotional problems stem from the humiliation of having to move from the first to the second seat in front of all my peers. I should sue my band teacher. Except he’s probably no longer living because he smoked a lot, and even if he is alive, I can’t, uh, remember his name. (The trauma has blocked it out). Besides, then I discovered sports and never gave music a second thought. So you can just have that first chair because I don’t want it anyway.
But I digress.
So our kids have been pretty much saturated with music their whole lives. We were some of those crazy parents…okay, well, I was one of those crazy parents that played classical music to the babies in utero. With each pregnancy, out went the U2, the Credence and George Strait, and in came Mozart, Beethoven and Bach (don’t worry; the kids were reintroduced to the first three at the appropriate age).
They’ve been in music classes** since age 6 months – wow, does time fly or what? - and one will be starting piano. Which is why (you guessed it) I really wanted a piano.
You can use a keyboard instead of a piano to practice on, and that’s what a lot of families do. But I had my heart set on a real piano. There’s such a difference in sound and the ways the keys feel.
My foster family had a piano. I remember my brother practicing his lessons on it, and my mom playing Christmas carols on it. I have some emotion wrapped around a piano.

There’s just a couple of difficulties with the whole piano lust, the first being that pianos are really expensive, the second being that pianos cost a whole bunch of money, and the third being that you have to pay a lot in order to get a piano. Plus, I didn’t really have a place to put a piano, seeing that our home is a bit, oh, shall we say…square foot challenged. But we like our home a lot, so we just refer to it as “cozy”.
So we went to a piano store that sells new and used / refurbished pianos, just to look around.

Just in case you didn’t know, pianos are really expensive. Like, four numbers kind of expensive, at least. I’m talking four numbers before the decimal point, even the used pianos. Some were breathtakingly beautiful, in design and in sound. But I saw my hopes of getting a piano fading rapidly, because I work pretty closely with our household budget and as far as I could recall, there was not a line item in there labeled “piano”.
The owner was a really knowledgeable guy, and helpful, too. We talked about what a gift it is to children to expose them to music, and to develop the skill of playing piano, and all the benefits they reap from it - benefits that last a lifetime. Buying a piano is really an investment.
Then the store owner said the magic words.
“I have a finance program.”
The tripod of American money management, right? “I see, I want, I finance”.
So, did we or didn’t we?
I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow. I have to go play our piano.

**the music classes I'm referring to is Musikgarten and if you're interested check out www.musikgarten.org
For the local studio, www.musikgarten.org/musictogrowchico . It's a really fabulous and comprehensive music program.