I love snow days. I love snow weeks in fact. Fortunately Hurricane Irene seems have passed to the east of us, so we’re getting light rain and wind. It hasn’t been at all unpleasant so far. I’ve spent the entire day going through old files from 30 years ago. It’s good to go through every now and then and sort out what you want to keep for a few more years before finally throwing it away. One of my big defects is that I would do better to throw out sooner. But there are a lot of lessons in the things that we hold on to, no doubt! It gives perspective. I found my tax declarations from 1983, when I was 19 years old and had no idea what a tax declaration was. The form itself freaked me out at the time, completely incomprehensible. When I look at the magnum opus I file every year to the IRS with depreciation schedules, home office deductions, dividend and interest statements and the like, I realize it’s taken me the better part of 20 years to learn about money and its role in my life, and not my role in its life. No one teaches you in music school anything about money except that you’ll probably be lacking it throughout your life, that is, if you stay in music. I haven’t found that to be true. I’m not Bill Gates, and that’s fine. It’s a privilege to be able to do what you want in life, and to create works of art, recordings, pleasant memories. You don’t need millions of dollars to do that. I do remember the panic about filing my taxes, a panic that has diminished over the years, but has never really completely gone away.
