Annie – Part 4

Annie started going to a Jazz Dance Class and took Kristen with her. So, frequently, Ian and I’d pick them up after their class, and we’d go out to eat. Kristen did continue with the Judo, too, just not as consistently as Ian and me. Both Kristen and Ian became excellent competitors and won many medals and trophies. Me, not so much. But I did start helping out with the teaching. I also competed and won a few medals and trophies too. I worked and finally made it to Shodan around the time that Annie and I finally decided to get married in ‘82. Made Nidan in ‘84, and Sandan in ‘89. Both Ian and Kristen worked their way up to Jr. Ikkyu (signified by a purple belt) by then as well. Ian continued on to Senior Rank and brown belt, but I don’t remember how far he went. His attendance with me got very sporadic after that, living a year in MO, then with Annie and me for a year, back and forth… After 7th grade, Kristen decided that she wanted to live with her mother and Larry in MO for high school. And that was it, I didn’t see much of her until long after she was married.

Ian decided to do high school at the Cleveland School of the Arts near University Circle on the far East Side of Cleveland. Annie and I were living in ‘Little Italy’ at the time, about a quarter of a mile from the school. Annie wrote letters and talked with school officials to get him enrolled. She could be very persuasive, much more so than I.

Ian had learned blues scales and progressions from Jerry P., Kristen’s soon-to-be husband, while he was in MO. So, when he came back for high school, I enrolled him at the Cleveland Music School Settlement, over in University Circle, for music theory and got my classical guitar teacher to give him lessons, too. That didn’t last very long since Ian wasn’t very much into acoustic, classical guitar at that point in his life. Soon after that, I took him to a jazz club on the west side. He liked the guitarist in the group we saw there and began lessons with him soon after.

To be Continued

–LE