I can remember learning to play the piano and this in some ways led to me writing more over the years

My cousin was taking piano lessons and was about 5 years older than me. He also played the violin so I started at age 8 playing the piano with my Teacher who came to my home to learn to play the Piano. My parents were ministers at a church in Los Angeles and so someone had given them an upright piano that went to this church. Then later someone else gave me their violin because they weren't playing it any more because they were older then.

I was successful with the Piano and so piano and organ and keyboards became the best instruments I could play. Then by age 12 I started playing music in our church.

However, one important note is that I ONLY Played my pieces once through every day when I got home from school and also I could ask for certain songs I wanted to learn to play. So, I started learning things like the theme from "The Apartment" with Shirley Maclaine as well as classical songs as well as songs from Disney shows that I liked then too. So, by the time I was 12 years old I was pretty good especially on popular tunes one might hear on the radio. My mother was a coluratura Soprano with a really amazing voice and I had a pretty good voice too because I took after her having a gift for music as well. But, I decided not to become a professional musician mostly because I didn't like playing in bars and places were people were drunk or smoking cigarettes. So, I continued playing in church until I was 21 and stopped going to that church anymore.

In my late teens I taught myself to play the Guitar and flute and I found that I could take a flute camping with me on hikes the easiest, even though I bought myself a Yamaha nylon string guitar for my 25th birthday and hiked up in the snow to the Sierra Club Horse Camp lodge which is an emergency shelter for Climbers year around and no one was there so I stayed there a couple of days after I dug down to the door because the snow was up to the roof. But, it had a wood stove so I stayed there playing guitar and writing on my birthday in April that year in 1973. I had driven a lady and her 3 year old daughter to Mt. Shasta so she could take a bus from there to Alaska where her husband and she lived then. 

However, in my late teens I also started writing songs on my piano and often on guitar as well. I found that by playing a few chords like D, A, G  that I would write songs and also another combination I like was D, C, G for chord progressions. The first thing I ever wrote was a variation of "Heart and Soul" that I like playing on the piano. I found it easiest to write songs in the key of C because you don't have to worry about Sharps and flats. So, often I would write at first in the key of C just for the shear ease of doing that.

Then I also often wrote new lyrics to songs that were popular like Rocky Mountain High and "Almost Heaven West Virginia" which I think John Denver might have written both of them. And sometimes I would sing songs I wrote for girlfriends and other friends too or I would play for girlfriends and sing to them or with them on the piano at home. 

My parents gave me a Grand Piano for my 18th birthday which was great because I had already bought my first car that I worked to buy starting at age 16. It was a 1956 Ford Station Wagon that I called my "Surf Wagon" because I was a surfer from about 1962 to 1969 when a friend of mine was injured surfing. 

Then I moved onto Skiing and riding off road motorcycles and SCUBA diving and snorkeling.

So, playing music and writing music was something I liked to do in my spare time.

However, in 1985 when I was 37 my father passed away and I found I couldn't deal with my emotions very well after that and so I mostly stopped playing music because my father's death sort of shut me down emotionally. I guess in some ways I still haven't recovered from my father's passing and I'm presently 75 years old.

What that taught me was that I couldn't afford to lose anyone else that I was that close to. My mother lived until 2008 so she was around a long time after Dad died but it was sort of like when I lost Dad I lost both of them. Because she was never the same after my father passed away even though she kept living from 1985 to 2008 when she died at around 90 years of age.

So, I started to write more in the style that I write about Arcane in 1980 and I began to move away from playing music as much around 1985 when my father passed away. By 1998 when I almost died and had to retire I had a whole lot I had written between 1980 and 1998 so in 1999 I got my first website for blogging that I had to program myself in HTML "Hyper Text markup Languate" which is what the Internet is based upon that you are reading right now.

Then in 2007 I found this site you are reading here on which is at blogger.com and I have kept this site ever since mostly because I don't have to program things in HTML which takes about 90% longer to do that what is called "Compose" here at blogger.com.