You can teach an old dog some new tricks – including how to play the violin, losing a fear of acetylene torches or writing a book the right way.
On Tuesdays, I go to my metal working class, and I’m really excited. Twisting wire into various wearable art forms is my new hobby. Truth be told, it’s actually more a consuming passion than mere pastime – ask my husband, who has seen our home transformed into work stations where I cut, pound, and bend. Where I used to veg out and watch TV, I now sit in front of it with my container of scraps and twist my castoffs into needed components, while my husband roots for Phil Mickelson.
There are organizers I fill with beads and stones, metal and findings. I purchased a huge jewelry tumbler and adopted the husband’s Dremel. After absconding with most of his tools, I finally began to purchase the “real” deal from the local jewelers' supply. I paid a king’s ransom for a planishing hammer, but I can now tell the difference between the metal I forged with that tool and the cheap ball peen I bought from Home Depot.
The last few weeks, I’ve been playing with an acetylene torch. I’m afraid of fire – who wouldn’t be? – and it took a long, long, long while before I was comfortable standing near it. I’m still uneasy when igniting the torch, but once that hurdle is overcome, I’m off to the races. I could solder all night long. Copper, silver, wire, bezels, bring it on! I suppose it is too much to ask for a torch for Christmas?
I love to learn, and this is the latest in a long line of educational pursuits. Five years ago, I took up the violin. It’s an instrument I’d long wanted to play. Even though in the past I tinkered about with the piano and guitar, I had never learned to read notes. My entire impetus for learning the instrument when I did (besides my son leaving for college and taking his piano music with him) was to wrap my puny brain around the black dots on the page.
I had impressed a musical education upon my kids, realizing there were studies that showed people who could play music often did better in math and spatial reasoning. If music could increase the brain power of children, it should do something for adults. Even if the positive effects were minimal, I was going to learn how to read music if it took me the rest of my life, dammit.
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