givemetheusual

She held my wrist kindly with her gnarled, strong and soft fingers, and demanded, "Keep your pinkies straight! Straight! Straight! Straight!" to the beat of my pinky fingers striking the piano keys over and over. This bent-over woman in her nineties was asking so much focus and effort that the music in front of me swam through my tears of exasperation. Pinkies are just not meant to operate independently from their sisters, the ring fingers , I grumbled to myself. The pinky finger cannot simply strike a piano key, let alone rapidly switch with the ring finger repeatedly to make the piano's strings trill, like a little soldier banging his head against a flat piece of ivory. Over and over again. Banging their little heads. Speaking of which, I felt like banging my head against the piano's music stand. The bent-over woman in her nineties was Edith Reed, and she was not only a surprisingly intense piano teacher, but also woke up at 5 am every morning to walk five mil

On a sunny January morning last year, my sister picked me up on my birthday and drove me to go skiing. My sister and I are great friends, and we've been skiing for years together, usually with my dad, but today it was just us. We chatted the whole way up the canyon about her most recent art projects, her upcoming wedding in the spring, and other lovely things.  About halfway up the canyon, as I looked out the window at the full sun shining on the frosted hills, I remembered that a sudden warm spell in winter sometimes triggers avalanches. And an image of an avalanche came into my mind: the highest mountain shuddered with a low rumble and then released glistening swathes of snow that crash over the surrounding smaller mountains, flattening cabins, trees, skiiers, until it covered the cars at the bottom parking lots.  Completely overcome by this image, I felt my stomach sink in fear. And some arguing went on in my head between my irrational self (lets call her Izzy) and rati