Music

Day 58: I shall soon be saying farewell to an old friend, a 1890 Sohmer upright grand piano purchased in 1966. I was living in the greater Washington DC area at the time and was just starting life as a married woman, and if memory serves, the piano was a birthday gift from my new husband. I had moved across the country, leaving another piano in the keeping of my foster sister who was also a musician, and not having had one around for several months, I could feel my fingers losing their agility almost daily. This was a circumstance not to be endured, and thus I put "piano" at the top of my birthday wish list.

Not long after that, we relocated and the piano went into storage. There it remained for a year until another move brought us back out to the west coast. We arranged for our household goods to be shipped, and when they arrived, I remember clearly the shocked look on the movers' faces when they discovered that "pinio" (as it was listed in the inventory, along with "chester droors") was in fact a very heavy object that the two of them could not handle. The "pinio" went into storage again until they could find a third crewman to help get it off the truck.

Its subsequent history was no less amazing. When we divorced, I was again forced to find a temporary home for my instrument. My current music tutor offered space in his shop in exchange for allowing students to use it. When he suddenly lost his lease, my contact with him was broken and for six months, I had no idea where he had gone, nor did I know what he'd done with the piano. By the time I tracked him down, I had entered into another relationship with a man who had several strong, strapping friends, so once again, the piano (which had been foisted off on yet another person who thought it was theirs to keep) moved back into my home.

In the last iteration, another divorce found the poor piano stranded in an empty farmhouse until I could arrange to bring it here. Somewhere along the line, it had lost one of its wheels and had to be dollied in through the back door because it wouldn't fit through the front. An upright grand is slightly wider than your standard upright, by virtue of having a deeper and heavier sounding board.

You may be wondering why, after all this history, we are parting ways. There are several reasons, the first being that I simply don't play any more. The second is that I'm not getting any younger, and I know that somewhere down the pike, a move to smaller quarters is going to be unavoidable. I do not want to be caught at the last minute trying to offload a piano. Besides, we're old friends, and an old friend needs to be found a good home. I have to admit it makes me sad to let it go, but it's for the best.