Pianist Bill Evans

Once or twice a year a piano player stops in at the farm. You know, of course, that a piano stool is nothing more than a magnet for piano players. No sooner had Rainer and his wife Sabine from Frankfurt walked in the door last night when Rainer rushed over to the piano and started to play a Bill Evans version of I Fall in Love Too Easily. Pat Michaud had just tuned our piano so it sounded pretty good. I grabbed my bass and we played for four or five hours, only stopping when my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, dragged us in to the dining room to eat.

This morning I had just finished power washing mold off the east side of the house so Marsha could paint it when they drove in the dooryard again and Rainer asked if he could send an email to his son in Germany. All this time Marsha is in 7th heaven scrubbing and cleaning the bedrooms upstairs and you can well understand that after Rainer got out his email he couldn’t wait to rush over to the piano and play more Bill Evans. Well, you have heard me say that Marsha goes to sleep at night compiling a list of things that I absolutely have to do the next day and Rainer hadn’t played three changes before she shuts off her vacuum cleaner and yaps downstairs like Old Aunt Shaw, “None of that, none of that.” Scared the poor man half to death. Of course Marsha didn’t know that Rainer was visiting and thought I was slacking off in there.

I feel good about the whole thing.

Does this not indicate that my wife thinks I can play piano like Bill Evans?