Day 79 (11/12 - Thurs)

I received some CD's in the mail today, the happy result of an old Amazon.com gift certificate I had laying around until recently. They are all recordings of George Winston, working his simple magic on the piano.

Ah, the piano. My favorite instrument. (after the human voice, that is) My mother made me learn piano as a child, and I enjoyed getting better at it, but boy did I sure hate practicing those 30 minutes a day. I mean, there were Nintendo games to play and DuckTales cartoons to watch, for heaven's sake? Did my mother have no sense of balance? Fortunately, my mother proved wiser and stronger than me, and my practicing continued. And then, in high school, that magical thing happened: I started to love playing the piano. But not everything...my passion was find in playing certain kinds of music that, thanks to my older brothers and the Windham Hill record label, I had started to discover. In those days, Yanni (believe it or not) and Jim Brickman rescued my piano-playing career, and I am so very grateful to them for this gift. Now I can play decently well and with some measure of confidence I would never had had except for my mother and those sweet, pensive, soul-searching melodies of Yanni and Brickman, and yes, George Winston.

I've been slowly trying to fill out my Winston CD collection, and as of today I'm a little bit closer. Since I'm something of a sharer, here I will share with you one of my favorite Winston arrangements from his Summer album (which I've owned for quite some time) -- "Living in the Country." My advice is to start it up and just close your eyes, imagining looking out of a country cottage window out into a sun-swept field of wildflowers and behind it hills of summer grain. That's what I see anyway. Songs like this move something in me, and that is a treasure.