Not like Billy Joel but I could tinkle a bit.
I started at an early age with the legend in our small North Dakota town, Sybil McDonald.
I believe she was born in Scotland but I can't be sure.
Nor do I recall how she wound up in Stanley, North Dakota.
But she was, if not the only, the most in demand piano teacher in town.
And I spent six or seven years taking lessons from her.
As well as reprimands.
See her teaching involved, first, scales to limber up your fingers.
And then classical music from sheet music or books with the notes on the pages.
You learned what those strange spots meant and how to play them.
There's a mnemonic to remember your E-G-B-D-F notes in a scale: Every Good Boy Does Fine!
So we studied and played, some of us better than others, for years.
I, on the other hand, learned how to make notes "blue" and the songs, well, "jazzier".
When I did it during a lesson it infuriated my teacher.
After I got out from under her, a bit later in life, I learned some simple boogie-woogie songs and one cold winter night in another town in North Dakota I played in a couple of bars and got drinks bought for me and a couple of girl friends.
Not girlfriends, mind you, but girl friends.
I've lost it all now.
A couple of years ago I looked at a piece of sheet music and realized that I had lost all of my knowledge about it and didn't have the faintest idea what those splotches on the page meant.
I could have not played anything from them if my life had depended on it.
I found I could still pick out a tune or two with one finger on a keyboard but all of my training and my "bar talent" had gone down a rathole.
So just to prove that my tale is true, here's a photo of me at the piano, playing from the notes, sometime probably back in the mid 1950's.
You can probably judge the era by my haircut and that antiquated television set next to me.
Ah, memories.