I Loved this column--- and there is a great sentence toward the end--
the love of music, passed from one person to another, is the real prize.
Change "music" to "reading" and it's what we really try to teach- be it through Aurelius or Steven King---
A Mother Worthy of Note(s)
By RENA PEDERSON / The Dallas Morning News
The contestants are an unusual bunch. There's an attorney from South Africa. A tennis coach from France. A physicist from Massachusetts. A flight attendant from California. And a 64-year-old "doula" from New York City, who helps deliver babies.
You might say it's a different kind of reality show. They all will be competing in the amateur Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth May 31. What they have in common is that they don't perform professionally; they play for the sheer, exhilarating love of music – and perhaps to prove something to themselves.
That's why I'll be rooting for a Dallas homemaker named Anne Blakeney. Her primary job for most of her life has been her family – her husband and their three sons. That meant she had to put baseball games before Brahms for many years.
With her sons grown and out on their own, Mrs. Blakeney decided a few years ago that there were a few other things she wanted to accomplish before she turned 60. She made a list:
She wanted to do a half-gainer off the high board. She did that.
She wanted to climb one of the 14,000-foot mountains in Colorado, what they call a "fourteener." She did that.
She wanted to sing at Lincoln Center. OK, she fudged a little there, but she and a friend did go to New York and sang in the Messiah singalong at Lincoln Center. It was the Christmas right after 9-11 and the kind of moment that fills your heart and throat with so much emotion it is hard to sing. But she did.
And last, she wanted to compete in the Van Cliburn piano competition.
She had started playing the piano when she was just 4 or 5, begging her mother to please, please teach her. Her mother, Camilla Simpson, became her first teacher. And for the next five decades, she juggled Chopin and Beethoven along with school, dating, a young family, diapers, more diapers, car pools, home remodeling and getting dinner on the table. She played the piano for herself and the occasional neighborhood kid who might stop by and listen entranced.
After going to Fort Worth to hear the first amateur event in the Cliburn competition a few years ago, she thought: "I really want to do this."
She soon realized she would need serious help. She found a music teacher at Southern Methodist University, David Karp, who agreed to groom her. She practiced and practiced ... and practiced some more. She bribed a sound technician at her church with dinner so he would help her make a compact disc of her playing. It took four tries before she got one that sounded good enough to send in for the Cliburn competition.
She wrote on the application that she hoped she could be an encouragement for other stay-at-home moms who might have postponed their dreams to raise their families. "There are different seasons in life," she wrote, "and nearly enough time to do it all."
She had been through the kind of experience that writer Tom Wolfe describes in The Invisible Wife many times. You know, she explains, when you meet someone at a dinner party and they ask, "What do you do?" and you reply, "I'm a homemaker." She recalls, "They start looking over your shoulder for someone else to talk to or they talk to the person next to you, almost as if you didn't exist."
"I always came away hurt," she admits, "even though I am reasonably secure about myself. It is so amazing that their definition of homemaker is so one-dimensional that they didn't take time to discover I might be more interesting than they thought."
Several of the other 74 competitors no doubt could identify with that experience. There are homemakers coming from Vergas, Minn., Stillwater, Okla., and Gainesville, Ga.
Another is a 74-year-old homemaker from Rock Hill, S.C. She turned down a chance to study at Juilliard to marry and raise a family. She had five children and had to be content to play piano at prayer services at her Presbyterian church. Now a widow with four grandchildren, she arises at 5 a.m. to practice for the Cliburn competition.
Mrs. Blakeney likewise is starting to play for anyone who will listen, polishing her pieces for the program. "I suddenly realized I haven't played for people before," she admitted with a laugh, as she sat down at her restored Steinway the other night to give a recital of sorts.
Her mother, who is 95, had come by for a pork roast dinner and to hear her Cliburn selections. Her daughter told her she had decided to begin with a Debussy "Arabesque."
Her mother looked disappointed. "Why don't you play your Brahms ballad, dear? That's your flag raiser."
"Because I can nail the Debussy, Mother," her daughter replied, turning the sheet music and not missing a beat.
Her husband, Bobby, came in and sat down in an old wooden chair by the piano. The family's English setter flopped down between his legs. The music rolled through the room and filled the house – Chopin's Nocturne No. 7, the Third Gershwin Prelude.
Even though she had forgotten to wear her hearing aid, her mother nodded and smiled approvingly.
It was the kind of scene that makes you realize the love of music, passed from one person to another, is the real prize. But when May 31 comes, here's hoping the homemaker lets the Debussy rip and has the time of her life.
Rena Pederson is editor at large of The Dallas Morning News. Her e-mail address is rpederson@dallasnews.com. |
