May 14, 2011 10:14 p.m.

Home Again…

….. and not feeling especially good. 

Today was our 17 wedding anniversary.  But, it was a miserable day for us.  Not just the competition itself, but also experiencing, once again,  lack of consideration and respect from others. 

But I will talk only about the music competition.  Things did not go well for Chips, and I will not go into too much detail here on the blog.  We had a seven hour trip home, enough time to do a full post mortem analysis.  When I got home, I checked my lesson notes from the past few months and confirmed what we had suspected all along.  Some last minute decisions were made by our teacher, just two days before the competition, that significantly changed the way she wanted Chips to play his concerto.  It was, perhaps, a last ditch effort on the part of our teacher to add more “flash” to his performance, perhaps due to her fear of his very skilled opponents.  It was a recipe for disaster, and unfortunately, Chips was the unhappy casualty. 

On the way home, I sadly looked back at him in the van, seeing how he was feeling so incredibly dejected.  A boy who can play violin so splendidly should not be feeling this way!  Something is not right.  Fortunately, by the time we neared home, he was his normal self, laughing and giggling and pretending with his sister, enjoying games of “Go Fish” and “War”.  Chips is so incredibly resilient.

So it has been an especially hard experience for us.  For those of you who are interested, please email me and I will share the whole story with you.

billberna  at  bellsouth  dot  net. 

Strangely enough,  Chips’ duet partner just switched over to another teacher this week.  Hm…