I wasn't a pianist again for fifty years.  Until our church lost their pianist and asked me to help out.  I did, fearfully--because I was at that point unqualified.  My fingers were very rusty.  

But my kids were gone, I was retired, and had enough time on my hands to practice again.  It was fun, but only because I didn't have to play for a choir and learn musical scores again.  Just hymns.  I played for a number of years, and actually enjoyed doing it.  I did okay.  Not great, but adequate.  Kinda like they say how you never forget how to ride a bicycle.  Only problem was that at the age of seventy-something, I couldn't look up at the hymnal to read the notes and back down at my hands as easily. Back at eighteen, I didn't wear bifocals.

After I was a pianist, I was a military spouse.  I learned tactics, air support, and a bunch of other stuff that helped me understand things like why the Russians want Crimea.  Russia needs a path to the Black Sea.  They don't have a southern port.  I learned about keeping the troops supplied with food, shoes, ammo, and other supplies.  And how Napoleon got ahead of his supplies.  I learned the lessons of "A Bridge too Far."  None of which I used, but when you have a bunch of Marines sitting around shooting the bull, you learn things.

And then I was a mother.  Four children by the time I was twenty-five.  None of them remotely like the others.  Nothing I learned from raising any of them was worth anything raising the others.  I just tried to hold on.

And when I was twenty-eight, I started college.  Which I kept at until after I was fifty because if I stopped going, I had to pay back my student loans.  I started my first professional job at thirty-nine.  I taught math at an OSU satellite in Miami, Okla for twenty years.  

And now, I am a writer.  Who knows what I'm going to be when I grow up.