Growing up, music was always an integral part of my life.  Not just trying to listen to disco from a crummy transistor radio outside of my apartment, but singing every Sunday in church and listening to Mama play the piano.  She had a beautiful baby grand and she tried giving me lessons; I was just too awful to appreciate them.  To this day it is one of my few regrets.  I always loved to sing, though, and I grew up in choirs.  From school to church to the Dallas Girls’ Chorus, I truly loved to sing.  It was as natural to me as breathing.  I cannot recall if I have mentioned it here before, but I was spoiled with an embarrassment of musical riches.  I used to come home from school to find my mother masterfully playing Claude Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” on her beautiful baby grand just for pleasure.  My husband and I started our only child, and my mother’s namesake, on piano lessons last year when she was in kindergarten.  It amazes me the way she gravitates to our little upright for no apparent reason.  Whereas my “free stylings” were always discordant, our little one’s manage to sound like actual songs.  I cannot tell you how many times my husband has told her what a great job she did playing something she’d simply made up.  It is wild to me how life goes in cycles.  I used to be greeted at home after school with the sounds of my mother’s playing.  Now I hear the sounds of our only child gracefully picking out notes after school as I am going about my work.  The late German Romantic composer Robert Schumann once said, “When you play, never mind who listens to you.”  That is how I have always felt about singing.  Music, in whatever form, I believe can bring happiness.  And I think one of the universal things which unite us all is music.