I’ve been getting back into playing some piano lately. I have an off-again, on-again relationship with the piano: I took lessons for years as a kid, mostly ignored it through my high school years, and then picked it back up during college (the catalyst for that was a music appreciation class I took around 1990). I played through most of my 20s, and even took adult lessons for a few years in my late 20s and early 30s. I stopped the lessons in 2002 when we had Michael, but kept playing for most of my 30s, before quitting for the majority of my 40s and early 50s. I have always had a pretty good ear, but have never been good at sight reading or improvising. Given enough time, I can memorize and play very difficult pieces, but if you put some unfamiliar music in front of me and ask me to play it, I’ll be like a deer in the headlights. My son, Michael, can put me to shame in that department, and it’s one of the reasons I kind of stopped: memorizing lots of pieces takes lots of time; I had much less time to play in my 30s and 40s than I did in my 20s; and without time to memorize new pieces or the ability to (adequately) sight read, my repertoire shrunk, and playing the same 1 or 2 pieces over and over seemed boring and pointless. All of that said, I still kind of missed playing: it is a great way to de-stress and meditate, and after a while, you can get into kind of a relaxing, zen-like state of mind (not unlike riding a mountain bike on a smooth, flowy trail in the woods). All of that led to my decision to start playing again earlier this year. This time around, rather than trying to memorize Beethoven sonatas or Chopin ballades, I am working through Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, which I am hoping will help improve my sight reading as well as left-hand technique. My appreciation for Bach has really grown over the years, and I had figured for a while that I’d likely focus on Bach when I eventually started playing again. I am enjoying it thus far, so we will see where it leads.