Feleena Part 1

So my weekly piano lesson is scheduled for late afternoon on Mondays. My instructor’s name - call her ‘Feleena’... She reminds me of the namesake from the Marty Robbins songs about El Paso but she’s not Mexican. Her mother was born in Cuba and her father was African American. She was born and raised in Mount Clemens, MI.

She has the characteristic dark hair, an attractive Afro-Latino complexion and piercing brown eyes with an intelligence that is so fantastic, she thrills me every time I see her.

The first time I heard her play was when she auditioned for my choir in Farmington August of 2016. Her hands looked very fine - her fingers were gorgeous and moved so smoothly. Her playing was superior to all the others who tried out.

After a few choir rehearsals, I spoke with her and discovered she had studied in Cuba after earning her degree at the University of Cincinnati, and she had extensive experience playing for numerous groups and choirs. I told her of my interest in learning the twelve Spanish Dances by Enrique Granados, a composer of whose work she was familiar.... I also told her I was very ignorant musically - had dabbled a bit with a piano I had purchased a few years earlier, tried to teach myself a few things but really needed instruction. She said that many of her best students were adults with similar ambitions... We started lessons last March.

Since then, I’ve learned how to play three of them (#1,#7, and #6) and am currently in the middle of the fourth... I’m not going to say that I’m any good but for a beginner, I’m okay... I try to practice every day. I hop out of bed, get the coffee going and start right in.... Am hoping to learn the rest of them by the end of this year...

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It is interesting where fate leads. It was just dumb luck that I even found out about Granados. Around 1995, I went into a place called the CD (‘Compact Disc’ for you young ones out there) Connection in my home town of Dayton, Ohio, near my alma mater of Wright State University, and was shopping for music, wanted to expand my horizons, walked back to the classical music section and stumbled on an obscure recording from 1977 by a French pianist named Marylene Dosse.

From the first note, I was hooked. I’ve listened to her rendition of the Granados dances so many times, there are scratches on the disc that cause it to skip around. Some tracks don’t even work, which is a shame because I don’t think it’s available anymore...

My dream has been to learn them. If I never learn to play anything else, that’ll be okay.

I did try on my own, to an extent, by purchasing a midi keyboard and some tutorial software, circa 1996, which was back in the days when I worked at Bill Knapp’s Restaurant... I managed to get the basics- got through two courses and then purchased the Granados book of compositions which contains the 12 Dances. I started to learn #3, which I think is probably the easiest, but didn’t get any farther than that for many years (and found out later, thanks to Feleena, that my reading of it was all wrong)... I got sidetracked by work and a lack of focus - lame excuses really...

A lot has happened. I moved to Cincinnati in June 1997, to start an investments and insurance business, which is how I got securities licensed, with my step mother’s youngest brother, a man who turned out to be a swindler. When I discovered his criminality, I quit and ended up back at Bill Knapp’s for a while managing a restaurant in Livonia, Michigan, which was September of 1999. That’s when I moved to Farmington....

Of course, I was quickly reminded of why I quit the restaurant business after getting back into the swing of things. Being a manager is a physically and psychologically demanding job, especially at Knapp’s. The salary was okay but the hours were surreal. Quite often, I’d get home and just collapse into bed. Was so exhausted at times, I would forget to pay my own bills, even though I had the money. As I would learn later, there were problems developing with the company which is why they were pushing managers to the breaking point.

One morning in early February 2000, I was in the car about to pull out of my apartment complex to head to Livonia, but before I hit the gas to turn left, realized that I couldn’t take it anymore and chose to turn right instead, went down to Michigan Standard Bank where I had an account and asked for an application and also got instructions on how to apply. The manager told me their headquarters was in Troy, Michigan which is 45 minutes northeast of Farmington. So, I took the application home, filled it out, got a resume together, put on my best suit, and headed to Troy, where I spoke to an HR person who managed to get me in front of a sales manager for the investments department. Since my series 7 license was still good, I figured odds might be in my favor to get on with them as an advisor. But, I was ready to do anything to get out of the restaurant business.

It wasn’t until April, after a couple more interviews, that I was hired... May 1, 2000 was my first day. The position paid 100% commission. I was a registered representative. They put me in the toughest territory they had, which was Redford-Detroit. I was assigned six branches, three in Redford, two in Detroit and one, inside a grocery, out in Hamtramck.

I quickly learned the Detroit branches weren’t worth the effort....