I’m the youngest in my family, and when I was a little girl and starting school, my mother was faced with a house empty of children – albeit for only a few hours a day – for the first time in her entire life.

She would be the first to tell you that she didn’t initially handle it well.

For her own sanity, she started a part-time job in a nearby town, and then when I was nine, she went to work full-time in the city. There are two things that stick out for me about that period in my life: one, I had a lot of new chores that were now my responsibility, and two, we started to get the occasional “luxuries”, or “extras”, that my friends had but that we could never afford before.

The Christmas after Mom started working, we got our first colour TV. I think it was the second Christmas that we got the electric Yamaha organ.

We’re not a particularly musical family, as families go. A couple of my brothers had been in the high school band, and my dad would break out his accordion on special occasions with enough encouragement and Scotch, but that’s about it. When we got this electric keyboard, though, I was entranced. I put away my tinny child’s piano from Simpsons-Sears, and had my grubby wee paws all over this expensive new family toy.

My dad could play almost any song he knew by ear, and I thought that was so cool. Unlike my brothers, he didn’t need a metal stand and a bunch of papers to make music – he just made it! That was my goal. So I learned to play by ear. Well, kinda. I would get Dad to play something on the keyboard, and would watch where his fingers landed, and I eventually developed a part-memory-part-ear kind of skill.

But once I was a little older, that wasn’t enough for me, because I’d found I could buy songbooks with sheet music of modern songs – songs I actually heard on the radio, and I wanted to play them instead of the songs my father played, like “The Tennessee Waltz” and “Muckin O’ Geordie’s Byre“.

But I wasn’t THAT great at playing by ear, so I taught myself to read sheet music. Well, again, kinda. It was work to remember what shaped notes meant how long of a count, so I just relied on being able to decide that part by ear. And, too, I couldn’t be bothered to do more with my left hand than the cheater, one-finger, chording that the keyboard offered. And of course the pedals are just for resting your feet on, right?

What evolved over time was an awkward but reasonably effective, weird-ass hybrid ability. I would often start a song by reading the sheet music to get the right initial notes and key. Then once I got into the groove and comfortable, I’d abandon the songbook and just play - a wee bit by instinct, some by memory, and the rest by ear.

The problem was, if I hit a particularly challenging and complicated part of a song, I couldn’t do it by ear and I had lost my place in the sheet music, so I’d have to scramble like mad and fake it until I could find my spot again in the instructions and know how to continue.

Ah, the metaphors that childhood offers for our future adult lives, eh?

Anyway, I could play “Delta Dawn” and “Babe” and the theme from “Ice Castles” and they’d be recognizable, so I was happy.

There is no way in hell, though, that I could ever – then, or now – play like this 10 year old girl. Amazing.