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| your blogger in a red hat |
I was born in Seattle, and grew up across Lake Washington in the Lake Hills neighborhood of
Bellevue. We had a huge backyard, partly wild, that sloped down behind our house. Our living room window looked out on what was essentially a broad peat-bog, occasionally farmed, that stretched out northward from Phantom Lake.
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| Holmes Harbor, with Paul |
About the time I entered Kindergarten my parents built a cabin near Freeland, on Whidbey Island, at the south end of Holmes Harbor, where summers were spent with my two brothers and cartloads of cousins, mucking around on the gravelly beach and venturing barefoot into the mudflats.
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| blogger and his mom |
My mom was a fine mezzo-soprano, played violin, was the choir director at our church - Bellevue First Methodist, later Bellevue First United Methodist - and also directed an amateur women's chorus - The Lake Washington Singers, still singing after all these years - throughout my childhood. My earliest musical memories are of Mom singing and practicing violin, of the hymns, choirs, and organ at church, and of the sounds of women singing in chorus.
When I was 5, by then a proud member of the Cherub Choir, my older brother started piano lessons. Mom soon found me sitting up at the old Howard upright in our basement playing through his assignments. I started official piano lessons myself in the 1st Grade, when I turned 6.
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| Freeland Wall Raising |
