I’ve now been taking bagpipe lessons for about nine months, a good long time to be pursuing most activities and long enough to become quite accomplished in some. But, of course, piping is not just any old activity, as this fairly well-known quote from writer Neil Munro makes clear:

To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning, and seven generations before. At the end of his seven years one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and leaning a fond ear to the drone he may have parley with old folks of old affairs.

That quote is one of my favorites. In fact, it’s currently the wallpaper on my laptop.

The two sentences above are just the beginning of a very evocative little section that goes on to talk about pipers being able to hear their forefolk “plaided in skins, towsy-headed and terrible, grunting at the oars and snoring in the caves” and standing by “the cairn of kings” and seeing “the moon-glint on the hook of the druid” and other neat stuff like that. All of it appeals to the fantasy writer in me, the born-in-the-wrong-century side of me. But it’s those first sentences that remind me to keep the struggle of piping instruction in perspective. After all, I’m only 47, and based on Munro’s reckoning, I’ll be well into my fifties before I even glimpse “the start of knowledge.”

There are days when I think I actually have come a long way. I’m starting to get a nice collection of tunes down on the practice chanter, and I can now wail out a few of them on my Gibson Fireside smallpipes — which I’ve owned for years but couldn’t get a note out of until last fall. And now, at last, I’m finally starting to “wrestle with the octopus” of the Great Highland pipes, after receiving a gorgeous set of Dunbars from my wonderful wife for Christmas. So, progress … yeah.

But then there are days like I’ve been having these last two weeks, days that the fingers just don’t want to work, when the simplest embellishments get rushed or crunched or missed altogether, and when my teacher wisely tells me to stop, catch my breath, and go back to the exercises I thought I’d mastered months ago.

It’s times like this that re-reading the Neil Munro quote really helps, as does reading many of the posts at my favorite bagpipe forum or looking over the advice of the great Jim McGillivray, who says the only way to learn a tough embellishment is to play it once, then play it a million more times.

This is no ordinary instrument, and you’ve got to accept that or you’ll never get anywhere.

I guess I’ve got about six years and three months to go before I can start really learning this beast. It sounds like a long time, but I can wait. I know the old folks will still be there, ready to parley by the cairn of kings, when I finally arrive.