Well, I'm fresh off my second guitar lesson . . . I sent my teacher an email this week, telling him I wanted to learn some tunes. He came up with 3, which I present in (his) ascending order of difficulty: Angelina the Baker, the Temperance Reel, the Irish Washerwoman. Of the three, the only one I'd heard before was the Irish Washerwoman. And - this will surprise nobody who has a smattering of knowledge of reading theory - I came home and mastered the 'A' part to the Irish Washerwoman (these tunes all have an A part and a B part; each part is repeated twice before moving on) with hardly a blink. (Reading theory, btw, says that a child's motivation for reading a particular text is, like, 40 times more predictive of the child's success than either the reading ability of the child or the difficulty of the text. Not to mention the importance of background knowledge: Ie, how a text - or a tune - is structured; the content dealt with in the text; the context in which the text is used . . . )

I'm just thrilled beyond belief to have mastered part of a song.

And I'm also thrilled, because I can see that it won't be long before I can play this song while concentrating on learning the notes - I really want to learn to read music, not just tablature. The printout I have gives a combined tablature and traditional musical notation. I'm using the tablature to get the tune down; once I do that, I'm going to concentrate on learning the notes themselves on the guitar fingerboard.

I'm astonished at how much left-brain activity I am applying to this learning task. Kids don't do this, I know - but as an adult learner of a 'second language' (if you don't automatically understand why I think of music as a second language, holler and I'll elaborate), I have different skills and abilities to bring to the task. I've lost a lot of plasticity in my brain - that darned corpus collosum has been rigid for three decades and counting - but by golly, I have analytic abilities Out the Wazoo. Old age and cunning will beat out youth and skill. (Or something like that. I saw a t-shirt to that effect some 20 years ago . . . if I had my memory, I might even be able to remember the exact wording . . . oh, well, never mind . . . )

Anyhow, I am thoroughly enjoying myself. As I was telling Louise tonight, I think that perhaps playing the guitar will be the perfect antidote to mid-semester stress; it involves a combination of physical and mental activity, it's completely engrossing, and it is easy to pick up and put down. My other hobbies share the same characteristic of being physically and mentally engrossing, but they have down sides: Knitting, for example, is both physical and mental but results in a proliferation of garments (and if you leave it for a while and then pick it up again, you have Stitch Irregularities that impair the final product); bicycling is aggressively physical and wonderfully relaxing, but who has two, three hours of daylight at a whack in the school year?

The only close alternative is watching hockey (which is not physical, admittedly, but still): Very engrossing, you don't have to remember anything from game to game, and you produce nothing while you watch. And this year, as an added benefit, when Brendan Shanahan scores - and they play his signature song, which just happens to be the Irish Washerwoman - I'll be able to play along . . .