I spend an inordinate amount of time at keyboards these days. I play the Steinway daily but have become displeased with its performance. It seems to make the same mistakes it was making two years ago. The Steinway was an upgrade from the little Starr grand I played for almost forty years. It seems little to ask that a quality instrument like a Steinway would make fewer errors than the Starr.

This leads to my next keyboard complaint. I am typing on a MacBook Air, a rather modern machine, and yet it allows grammatical mistakes I was making on a typewriter fifty years ago. Oh, there are marvelous tools such as spell check and Grammarly, but I would rather the keyboard get the words right without having to go back and make corrections. Lately, it has been typing loose when I clearly mean lose, an inexcusable error. Three weeks into the new year and typed text favors 2020 to 2021.

I am waiting for a piano and a computer that avoid bad fingering, rendering a perfect result for my efforts. Perhaps, an earphone-like device that takes thoughts from my brain, makes necessary changes, and then produces a masterpiece.

After all, it is 2020––I mean 2021.

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I spent my life teaching 6th graders. We have always been involved in church. Now I spend my days in an old stone house, wandering our four acres, and writing.