Bad Idea

Learning, teaching, writing, reading, humming or singing anything to do with Music Theory at an early hour is dumb. Period. First and foremost, we are talking about musicians. Musicians are practically vampires. The night provides the vital marrow for all things creative. The morning is our enemy. When the sunlight comes it practically burns us. Some have even been known to hiss at the elusive morning rays as they slither, uninvited, into the cracks of the shades of our peaceful bedroom coves around 6 a.m.

So when the music student, and professor, waddle in to class in the wee hours of the morning, primo-learning or teaching is not something that generally happens. (Without MASSIVE quantities of caffeine.) I am sure that there are those of you that read this blog that rise with the chickens and believe that anyone who gets up past 8 is a sinning sloth even if they only got to sleep at 4 a.m.

On Saturdays my dad used to start mowing the yard at 8:45a.m.-sharp. About 10 minutes into the mowing I would begin to wonder just how many times the mower needed make its way directly past and very close to my window facing the back-yard. I began to imagine that the grass under my window MUST be darn near indestructible. Then suddenly the mower would reach my window and stop moving. Still running but not moving. I would lift my head from my pillow and deliriously peek out my window to find that my dad had mowed well into the middle of the yard but had decided to park the mower, running, underneath my window as he picked up some very 'dangerous-to-mower' sticks and took a sip of tea.

If none of this prompting and mower-hinting worked after 10 minutes or so, the sound of the mower passing my window would be accompanied by a few loud bangs on the window pane. A lovely duet of mower and knuckle-to-window.