Learning To Serve Through Music

 My Bishop, our lay church pastor, arrived at my door. I was just 15 years old and not yet in high school. My mother invited him into our living room and he started the conversation by thanking me for the years I'd spent accompanying in the children's meetings. He told me that using my talent in service to our church community was very important. There were blessings attached. 

I wondered where he was headed. My mother was beaming because it made her so happy to hear that I was needed. Then she said very seriously, "She does need to practice more."

He explained that he had an idea that might encourage more of the "p" word. Would I please take on playing the organ in Sacrament Meeting, our worship service? What? 

No one seemed to understand that the organ was not just a different kind of piano!

The sound died away immediately and that required legato fingering which I didn't have to do when I used the sustain pedal on the piano. There was also an entire keyboard for the feet. I felt a fear rise up but I pushed that down and replaced it with satisfaction that I was needed. 

I said yes.

Ah, the optimism of youth. I was rudely pulled from this positive mindset when the first Sunday I forced the congregation to endure one mistake after another. The organ is not as forgiving as the piano. A mistake on the piano could be slurred together with the sustain pedal but the organ just announced blatantly that I was on the wrong key. WRONG KEY!!!

We endured and persevered together, those kind saints and I, and the tiny flash of light I had during many hours of being alone at the church, practicing, was that God loves the child who willingly serves. I have been serving at the organ for decades.

I did not really learn to play properly until I went off to college and there had some "real" organ lessons.

 My teacher had a pipe organ in her house. I wondered sometimes what her neighbors thought. She was eclectic and demanding. She drilled the stop names into our heads. The 16 foot gambe was a string sound that came through a 16 foot pipe, the 8 foot flute was sonorous and smooth, the 2 foot piccolo was piercing and these together, with others, created a symphony of sound. 

So, what were the lifelong blessings?

*I learned to collaborate with the congregation and invite the spirit of God into our meetings

*I learned to follow the conductor

*I learned the words to most of the hymns

*I learned to trust that my feet below on the keyboard would follow the path

*I was early to the meetings

Did I sense the day that I received the call that this instrument would provide weekly worship for me all my life?

I had a flash, just a flash of insight.

Click here to go back to the 31 Days In October index page.

The Ninth Grade Speech Class

 

  My palms are sweating.

The rhythm of my heart increasing. 

   There’s no forgetting, 

The memory of speaking, unceasing. 

  Ninth grade speech class,

It is now my turn to speak.

  Fragile as glass,

I have never felt so weak.

    In ninth grade I chose speech as my elective. We met in the choir room so there were four rows of graduating tiers. I think we had desks, the kind with the movable desk top. Mrs. Johnson had blonde hair, pulled back in a fence twist. She often wore sweater sets in pastel colors. She was soft-spoken, kind, yet unrelenting when it came to meeting deadlines. Each Thursday and Friday we gave speeches. It took two days to hear each student. I felt impressed with her objective to enable us all to communicate better. Speaking in front was scary but I believed Mrs. Johnson when she explained that if we followed an outline our abilities would evolve.

• Present a catchy introduction and tell what you are going to say
• Make your first point
• Give an example
• Make your second point
• Give another example
• Summarize what you said.

We learned about persuasive speeches, how-to-speeches, story telling, and speeches to inspire. 

There was a definite flash of light in this semester of learning. I still use the basic outline whenever I speak in front of a group. There was one other point I still remember to this day.

Consider your audience. How can you communicate best in this situation?

Math learning comes and goes, science facts change, but communication is always a challenge and requires skills in speaking and writing.

 Click here to go back to 31 days of Writing index.

The Piano

     Sometime around my eighth birthday my parents invested in a piano. 

Before that my brother's accordion, which he brought from Germany, accompanied all our singing at home. The upright piano was a refurbished model which had a mirror installed above the piano music stand. I was privileged to receive piano lessons. My brothers would have enjoyed music lessons but war time Germany made that impossible. When I started lessons with Mrs. Rasmussen, who lived around the block from us, I had no idea how vital the piano and the skill of playing the piano would be in my life. I had a small flash of light when I accompanied my family for the first time during our Christmas Eve singing. I remember feeling useful and important because I could read and play the Christmas songs.

I was a mercurial pianist. Sometimes I loved it and sometimes I noodled away the minutes doing nothing.   I had a good ear and a flair for improvisation which my teacher painstakingly tempered with diligent note reading practice. She would often say, "That's a lovely invention  but it's not what the composer wrote." 

I give my mother full credit for any success I achieved because she insisted I practice and she sat in the living room listening. That made a huge difference. When she listened, without judgement or correction, I practiced more attentively.

All of my shenanigans and insights at the piano were like shafts of light foreshadowing the future when I would repeat these sayings to my own piano students.

                         Click here to go back to the index page for 31 Days of Writing In October.

My Third Grade Teacher

                               

                                       Mrs. McConahay was my third grade teacher. 

Our classroom was located on the second floor of Sumner School, an old building with large windows, two short blocks from my house. I walked home everyday during our lunch break.

Spelling was difficult for me.

The reason was perhaps due to the German reading lessons I received from my mother before school. She was determined to help me read and write in my mother tongue. German words seemed to be much easier to spell and pronounce. There weren't so many silent letters.

Each week we received a list of 12 new words in school. We wrote the words on the lined paper in our tall spelling folders. We also recited the spelling aloud in class. Then Mrs. McConahay gave us a so called trick to memorize the correct spelling. On the day of receiving the new list she invited us to go over each word in our heads before we fell asleep. She explained that we would remember the words and their spelling the next day and longer if we did the trick that night. It worked. My spelling difficulty improved. 

This "trick" was a shaft of light that would stay with me forever.

The trick is simply the importance of recall. When we remember or recall a new learning within 24 hours the information is stored in long term memory.

Today I teach this trick to my piano students. I tell them about Mrs. McConahay and my spelling challenges. I invite them to play through their new pieces on the evening of their piano lesson and assure them that they will remember all we talked about in our lesson if they do this simple task of recall. 

Click here to return to index of 31 Days of Writing in October

Bonding With My First American

 

    

    After arriving by ship into the New York harbor we boarded a Greyhound bus for the trip across America from New York City to Salt Lake City, Utah. I don't have memories of that but my brother describes it very well.

      Now came the ugly part of the journey, three days and two nights on a bus. At first it seemed comfortable in the cushioned Greyhound seats, but as time wore on, there was not a single body position that conformed with the concave seatback. I stood in the aisle, which the bus driver did not like; I knelt on the seat looking backwards, which the people behind me did not like because I stared at them; I also tried lying on the floor in front of the seat, which Peter or Gӧtz sitting next to me did not like. Finally I found the solution. As I looked at the luggage rack, I saw some spaces between suitcases. I stood on my seat, pushed items left and right, and created an approximate 5-foot space. With a little help from Peter (or Gӧtz, I don’t remember), I got into the luggage rack, where I could finally lie flat. It felt unbelievable great. It reminded me of the relief I got as a refugee in East Germany after being sandwiched between smelly people and not being able to sit down. I repeated the escape to the luggage rack several times, always wondering when the bus driver would put an end to it for safety reasons, but he was a man of mercy. Peter and Gӧtz liked my disappearance because it gave them an extra seat to spread out.  Although the bus stopped for short breaks quite regularly, the major stops were Chicago, Des Moines, Omaha, and Cheyenne. Looking out the window, we couldn’t believe that a country as famous as America could have so much land not occupied by anybody. The fields and grasses seemed endless. Cows in Germany ate lush green grass, whereas here they ate weeds with a little brown grass mixed in between.

I cannot remember much about our arrival in Salt Lake City, but I know we were met by Hanna and Albert, along with others (?). Again we were squished into a vehicle, but the ride to Murray was only about a half hour, along State Street. Hanna and Albert’s house was surrounded by fields, covered with tall grasses and sunflowers. Finally, I could smell the outdoors again, I could run, and I could climb hills, trees, and roofs.  

I do have a glimmer of memory when I woke up the day after arriving at my Tante Hanni's house. My parents were still asleep and I wandered into the kitchen announcing to her that I required, "Milch".  She gathered me up into her soft embrace and I knew that I was safe. She was love personified. From that day forward she played an important role in my life. My mother allowed me to stay a week with her every summer and during our time together she taught me about faith, commitment, modesty, and the importance of learning. She did have complexity which I didn't understand as a child. She made some life decisions of which my parents disapproved but to their credit it did not separate me from her. They had a relationship with her of mutual support. Yes, there were whispered conversations, but her place in my life never diminished. 

When I moved to the Pacific Northwest our relationship changed to phone calls and letters and yearly visits. Her first question to me was always, "Are you happy?". It was a short question with long undertones of context. I took it to mean was I living up to my potential? Sometimes I side stepped her question and other times I tried to answer from the heart. Being with her often brought flashes of light. Even after she died, her influence was palpable. I felt her talking to me when I took my daily walks. She prompted me to continue with genealogy research. She prompted me to write my version of the story of her life in book form.

  Because she didn't have biological children she chose to open her heart to her nieces and nephews and then to many children of trusted friends. To my amazement she had deep and lasting connections to countless people. I felt humbled and grateful to be in her circle of love.

                                      Click here to go back to links for other days in October.

Flashes Of Light

 

Not electric, not fire,

not weather in the heavens,

The light flashes appear

Not as I count sixes or sevens.

They can’t be seen by the eyes

Only evidence when I look back,

  Then I notice the ripples

And they become easy to track.

       Recently I heard Stephen J. Lund speak  about a business trip he took to the Far East. He said that during the drive from the airport, he felt inspired to look through small gaps in concrete wall slabs through the bridge they were driving on. Through those gaps he could see a beautiful view. He compared the light coming through the gaps to the  flashes of light people receive from God during  life’s journey.

“Life often presents like an incessant grey wall stretching off into nowhere, but here and there, if you watch for them, flickering assurances of God’s love for us will become evident.” 

It may be a knowing that someone or some experience will have a lifelong impact. Sometimes it comes as assurance that you are invited to step forward and pursue the light. These are more than coincidental events. They are more than serendipity. They are similar road signs or landmarks that appear over and over again in your life. 

This is a landing page for the daily posts. I invite you to click the links and read along when they become live.

October 1- Introduction To My Theme "Flashes of Light"

October 2- Bonding With My First American

October 3- My Third Grade Teacher

October 4- Buying The Piano

October 5- The Speech Class In 9th Grade

October 6- Learning To Serve Through Music

October 8- Daring To Debate

October 9- Entering The University

October 10- Should We Marry

October 11- Into The Fire

October 12- The Blessings Of Giving Birth

October 13- Imposter Syndrome

October 14- Who Knows Your Child Best?

October 15- The Audacity To Start a Business

October 16- Your Son Is In The Principal's Office

October 17- I Was Called To The Black Hole

October 18- Traveling To Germany

October 19- Jump Out Of The Boat

October 20- My Early Morning Guests 

October 21- Discovery My Creativity

October 22- Battling With Resistance

October 23- No, Not One

October 24- The Last Witness To My Birth

October 25- My Walk With Cancer

October 26- A Gathering Of Women

October 27- On getting Older

October 28- Some Of My Things

October 29- Some Of My Things Part 2

October 30- Some Of My Things Part 3

October 31-Some of My Things Part 4

October 31- Summary Of Flashes Of Light

Thirty One Days Of Writing In October

Flashes Of Light

           I feel called to write a blog post everyday in October. I’ve done it before and as before, I feel a little overwhelmed. I like to choose a unifying topic and expound upon it from day to day. This year I want to write about ‘flashes of light” in my life. 

         My definition of ‘flashes of light’ are experiences in life where the improbable happens and changes the course of what might have been. Do I have 31 flashes in my life or in the life of my family? At this point, I don’t know, but I do know that inspiration will push me forward to find the next experience and I believe I will finish the course.

        I will begin with the story of my unlikely birth. World War 2 challenged the heart and soul of both my parents. My father was drafted as a young man with one child and sent to the Russian front. He endured lack of food and injury and in a ‘flash of light’ was wounded in the knee, leaving him unable to walk. A train was going back to Germany and he was put on that train which allowed him to convalesce in what is now East Germany and avoid more combat.  His motto saved his life many times. “Never volunteer for anything, stay in the middle of the pack, shoot only if you absolutely have to, duck and keep your mouth shut”. He came back to his family and had the gumption to take us out of Silesia, which is now Poland, and into West Germany with only a handcart filled and our belongings. 

         By then my parents  had three boys, all over 12, and a new start at a grave stone monument business in the West. But again he saw ‘light’ which convinced him that Germany would not recover in time to give his boys a chance at higher education. He started talking about America. My mother had a sister there and that gave her the courage to agree to leave. As preparations were made to emigrate my mother found she was pregnant at 43 years of age. My father and the teenage boys were aghast. The emigration was postponed and on October 24, 1953, I arrived, healthy and happy. The fact that I was a girl after three boys was a bonus which everyone recounted to me again and again. I felt wanted and loved. My brother writes in his journal:

         “I mention the year 1953 again, which was the year our sister Gabriele was born. It was a home birth. We were old enough to understand all the preparations and possible risks. All of us couldn’t wait to hold her and spoil her with attention. My father always wanted a girl. He had three sisters, and the opposite sex was socially more rewarding for him. Being an artist, he loved painting, singing, and dancing more than athletic competition. Gaby was going to receive all his affection and creative energies. We were now a family of six, rather large by post WW II Germany standards.”

         At two and a half  I took the sea journey from Bremerhaven, Germany to New York. It was improbable that I would come so late in my parent’s life. But I did. I missed out on the negative experiences of war and started out my life in a more hospitable place where I was nurtured and guided. 

   On October 1st I will be writing everyday and I would be honored if you read my words. Have you had 'flashes of light in your life'? 

Click here to connect to my October- Thirty One Days Of Writing homepage.