Remembrance

Today is the first day of the first month of 2013. I'm exhausted after about 10 hours journey form Yogyakarta to Bandung by night train. The train departed on time, but arrived late. I slept enough on the train but not well, since a family brought a baby, and the baby cried very often. It was really bothering me, and someone called me around midnight but I did not answer it, because I was sleeping. I came at my room in a boarding house in the morning, about 6.30. The room was really messy. It took me about 4 hours to clean it up.

The day before today, I still in my hometown. I didn't know how it came into my head, when suddenly I started to search piano songs which I've heard for the first time. The piano songs played by Richard Clayderman. The story begins when my mom was in a bookstore, when she was in the store, looking for books, she heard a beautiful piano ballad song. Being curious, she came to the operator and asked them about the song. She was being informed that the song title was 'A Comme Amour', played by Richard Clayderman. Later, she bought a cassette contained those song.

After she came home, my mother played those on tape player. Me, being a fifth or sixth grade of an elementary school student, found the songs were beautiful. Before I knew the song, I didn't know anyting about piano, I didn't care about music. But, after I heard that, I became very interested in piano. I started to collect money, and used it to buy more cassettes. My father had a keyboard, and I started to play what I heard on the keyboard. I didn't know any music theory, except the one from my grandma. My grandma once taught me some child's songs on her electric organ when she was still alive, and I was just a first grader in elementary school.

Entering primary school, I started to learn piano on my father keyboard. I enjoyed Richard Clayderman's songs so much. Some of them were 'Ballade pour Adeline', 'A Comme Amour', 'Les Derniers Jours D'anastasia Kemsky', 'Love Story', 'Maria-Tonight-America (from the opera West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein)', 'Time to Say Goodbye', 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', and many more. At second grade, I started to get myself a piano lesson, from a local institution. I asked my parents to get me those piano lesson since they didn't let me to go to Bali Island on school holiday. I ever mastered several songs, like 'Ballade pour Adeline', 'A Comme Amour', and 'America'. For the 'America' song, I arranged it for piano solo by myself, because I didn't have the piano score, and I performed my 'America' in a musical class practice test when I was a first grader in high school.

Yesterday, I got some Richard Clayderman's songs from youtube. I also search the cassettes which I bought a long time ago, and I found some of them still functioning, even covered by dust. Listening to the songs evokes memories of the past. This event makes me to think. Had not my mother heard the song in the bookstore, maybe I've never studied piano, and maybe I've never been a piano player. Thanks mom, because you have introduced me beautiful piano songs in my early life.