The tour dates continue to multiply, almost as if the map itself has become involved in the booking process. Places keep emerging I never heard of, towns and small communities where someone has heard of me and apparently keen on my stopping by. Slowly the practical is solved: what the shows can afford, where I’ll sleep, how far the next drive, and most importantly, whether somebody can locate a piano that hasn’t spent the last forty years serving as a shelf for Christmas decorations. There is something strangely moving about it all. Each new one makes the country a little smaller and somewhere out there a piano I haven’t met yet is waiting for us to begin arguing.