You always remember your first time, right? I know I’ll certainly remember mine.

I am no longer a piper who hasn’t performed in public.

Yesterday’s concert/recital went very well. The weather was fantastic, the crowd was large and quite appreciative of our student efforts, my rattled nerves weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be, and in the end, I lived to pipe another day.

I played a mini-set of “Mist-Covered Mountains” (the slow air that was played at President Kennedy’s funeral) and the upbeat march “Teribus,” which I made even more upbeat (and sadly less musical) by playing it somewhere around the speed of light.

I came dangerously close to losing things completely several times, once in each tune, when the fairly short blowstick on the Fireside Pipes slipped out of my mouth. That ticked me off a bit, because I had actually thought about that possibility and had considered adding my flexible blowstick extender, but ultimately decided not to. I hadn’t used the extender with the smallpipes before and didn’t want to deal with any new distractions. So instead I distracted myself by losing my grip on the stick. Fortunately, I was able to get the stick back in my mouth and the tunes back under control without too much damage.

I was also pleased to learn afterwards that the Negaunee Bandshell did a good job of amplifying and projecting the relatively quiet sound of the Firesides, eliminating my concern that I’d be playing my heart out for an audience that couldn’t hear a thing.

Looking back from the safety of the morning after, I am absolutely glad I did it. I’m glad my instructor and my family talked me into it. I’m glad I didn’t listen to my whiny internal reasoning and decide to wait until I was more comfortable or relaxed or experienced or any of the other dozens of things my brain told me to wait for.

All in all, it was a very good day. I conquered a fear and learned a lot. And I had loads of fun. What else can you ask for on a Sunday afternoon?

I didn’t expect it to happen quite this soon or in quite this venue, but it looks as if I’m going to have my public piping debut tomorrow (Sunday).

My instructor, who otherwise seems to be a sane, perfectly rational human being, has somehow convinced me to take part in a piping and highland dance concert in Negaunee, Michigan — his home base — located about two hours from here. Several of his students will be playing. When he first suggested that I be one of them, I laughed. Surely he was kidding, I thought. But no.

I won’t be on the “big pipes.” I’m not ready for that by a long shot. But I will be playing my Gibson Firesides, struggling my way through a tune or two.

Performance anxiety? You bet. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better way to get over the nerves than to confront them head-on. And whatever happens — whether I’m great, mediocre or tank disastrously — it should prove to be an entertaining experience.

The concert is at 1 p.m. at the bandshell, on the corner of Pioneer and Lincoln streets in beautiful downtown Negaunee.

A map

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. If you can’t make it, no problem. I’ll post a report as soon as my hands stop shaking.

When you’re learning to play bagpipes, you can expect a fair number of questions, the most common of which is undoubtedly, “Why in the world are you learning to play bagpipes?” This is sometimes asked with genuine interest, even admiration, and sometimes in a borderline-polite tone that barely masks the questioner’s utter disappointment in you. That’s not too surprising in a world divided between those who love the pipes and those who hate them, with an extremely narrow middle ground between.

Among pipers on the Internet, there seems to be a fairly common school of thought that “average folks” don’t like the music simply because they’re exposed to so much bad piping.

That may be true in a few cases, but as a general rule … I don’t think so.

I can’t deny that people hear an awful lot of sub-par piping. Players rushed through the basics to help fill out the ranks of a band, long before they’re street-ready. Pipers who take wedding and funeral gigs despite the fact that they can’t properly tune their instrument or blow steady or hit their embellishments with consistency. But it doesn’t automatically follow that such not-ready-for-prime-time playing is the reason people dislike the pipes. That’s like saying there would be more classical music fans if they’d only sit and listen to a few more symphonies played by the world’s top orchestras, or more people would enjoy reading the classics if they took the time to really study War and Peace.

I think people are either born with a love of the pipes or not. If you’re born with it, as I apparently was, the sound of the drones starts something vibrating deep inside your head or heart. If you’re not, the only reaction triggered by the pipes is the overpowering urge to make a joke: “If you stop squeezing it, maybe it will stop screaming,” or “Hey, how did you get the cat inside that bag?”

I’m not saying it’s impossible to acquire a taste for the pipes; many have, later in life. But I wonder if those folks didn’t already have pipe-love deeply embedded on some hidden strand of DNA and just needed the right influence to activate it. In short, I think those who come slowly to the pipes are merely discovering what was there all along.

As for bagpipe jokes … some pipers find them offensive. Not me. I’ve heard some really funny ones. And it’s not as if I need any particular strength of character to withstand an onslaught of humor. I’m not fourteen, after all, when quitting the football team to study bagpipes can create some serious social challenges.

Likewise, I’m not bothered when people give me that aghast stare, and say, “You’re learning to play what?” I’ve accepted the fact that bagpipe music is way outside the mainstream, like just about every other kind of music that I enjoy. I know that those who feel moved to ask the question in that way simply don’t have the gene, and they would never really understand any answer I could give.

And on the bright side, I don’t have to worry about them stealing my iPod, either.

A brief update from yesterday:

I’ve begun the fine-tuning of the bookstore. The bagpipe pages, for example, now feature music from my own list of favorites instead of a generic selection. Much of it is also bagpipe music that should appeal to the — gasp! — non-bagpipe enthusiasts among you, including some groups that really know how to rock. More bookstore updates will follow in the weeks ahead, so keep watching.

Also, I meant to mention yesterday, but didn’t, that SixDegrees.org is a partnership with the wonderful Network for Good. Please visit them and learn more about a very easy way to support some very worthy causes.

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.