We decided to give our piano to family friends who've always wanted one. They've got a six-year-old who is the 2nd [duh!] most amazingly adorable little girl I've ever met and they have visions of piano lessons and Christmas sing-alongs. I didn't have the heart to tell them that it's a pipe dream...it's good to have something to grasp onto no matter how fleeting.
My friend showed up with movers and the piano is gone...and I'm sad.
We made some good memories with that cheap never-stayed-in-tune studio upright. I wrote some great music on that thing. We did have our share of sing-alongs with family and friends. It's gotten me laid quite a lot 'cause the wife loves it when I play & sing to her, especially original stuff. I've used it for venting, processing, sorting out my thoughts, catharting, meditating. There'd be times when I was in some kind of mental or emotional vortex and couldn't see a way out. I'd sit, play the first chords that came to me, next thing I know an hour's disappeared and all's right with the world again.
So why are we, two music-therapists-turned-ministers and still occasional song-writers getting rid of it? Simple. We're tired of hauling that thing around the country. Pianos are friggin' heavy! Ten years, four houses, two states, and one child later, we're just tired of hauling it around. It was gifted to us by our former [and pretty much still present] minister who hauled it to Virginia from the mid-west. We hauled it back here to Missouri and figured it didn't need an east coast sequel.
Yes, I used the word 'haul' in some form repeatedly because it is a haul; there ain't nothing easy about moving a piano. Unles you're professional movers who strap it on a dolly which they strap to themselves and lift it down icy steps in under 5 minutes. I don't feel they suffered enough to have hauled off a bunch of my favorite memories.
I guess I still got the memories.
I just don't have a piano.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Wow, how sad! I took piano lessons from 5-18 and though I don't play lately (the piano sits in my living room, out of tune, watching me walk back and forth by her every day), I sure do love that I can play. I had a job as the church librarian when I was 20 so I had a key to the building and when I was going through my first divorce I would go to the church late at night (this was before I had a piano) and play the chapel piano in the dark. It was definitely cathartic. I could play for hours when I was feeling any kind of intense emotion. Now I don't even have a piano bench. hahaha
Well, everything has a time for goodbye I guess. And once you're settled somewhere more permanently maybe you can get an even better one!
Wow how sad. I surely relate. My family moved a dozen times when I was a kid, and we took our full size upright everywhere... including to Florida and back to Washington. I hope to inherit it someday, and continue the moving it everywhere tradition.
And then there is a more zen response.
Attachment leads to suffering.
Post a Comment