THIS IS WHAT WE WERE MISSING

There were certain steps that had to be taken that were necessary prerequisites for home.  Belonging in a place does not happen overnight, nor is it achieved by anything as ultimately inconsequential as furniture, but such things are important in their own way.  And not all such things are merely furniture.

This story is riddled with contradiction, because this is the story of how a piece of furniture changed everything in a day.

What you do not want on a day that you are going to move a piano in the back of a pickup is rain.  It rained hard in the morning, drizzled through the afternoon, and was still bleakly overcast when we left home, but the weather was moving in the right direction and we had only one shot at this grand endeavor, which is to say that we were riding the border of the window in which both our volunteer muscle and our benefactors were available.  We brought with us a quilt that could work as a rain shield in a pinch.

I always thought we would have a piano, because I have never lived in a house without one.  As my recent inquiries have taught me, pianos tend to be permanent fixtures in whatever place they come to rest, and this was true for my parents’ piano for several reasons.  There is the sheer inconvenience of moving such a weighty wooden creature, but it was there to stay because it was an important part of our lives.  My younger self was confused by people who didn’t have one.

Whatever one’s superior accomplishments in other areas, the playing field is generally leveled by the presence of a four-hundred-pound piano, particularly when it needs to be loaded in a truck-bed several feet off the ground.  By this time the sky had cheered up enough that we weren’t concerned about keeping the piano dry, but the heavy lifting was more than enough trouble to be getting on with.  Mark and two friends and the man who was relinquishing ownership were able to pack it in and secure it, and then we had a slow drive home as we followed behind our new acquisition to make sure it didn’t topple down.  Although, as someone observed, if the worst happened we wouldn’t have wanted to be too close.

When I first began investigating pianos, I visited one that was being given away by the family of a woman who had recently died.  While I took measurements, her son told me that his grandmother had learned to play on it, and I wanted to urge him to keep it and have his kids learn, or his own grandchildren.  Such a leviathan investment is bound to stick around for a while even after the family interest has faded, but even inconvenience isn’t enough to convince many people to keep it.  None of the pianos I looked at came without stories of children who had played at one time and then given it up.

I took piano lessons on and off for about twelve years.  A long list of adults who told me that they regretted giving it up was what kept me motivated whenever I wanted to stop, so admittedly I wasn’t the most diligent student, since the guilt of others produced in me more of a determination than a work ethic.  But playing the piano was what I did.  It was like a puzzle you work on in your spare time; always there, always begging you to come sit down for a few minutes.

When we had arrived home without any disastrous occurrence, we had the additional hurdle of getting the piano up the porch steps.  I helped as I could, but predictably the three men did the bulk of the work.  When it was in the corner I had prepared, we found that it fit like a glove.  We were at least the third family to bring it into our home, but it seemed to belong with us.

While I was in high school, we spent a week in a beach house with some of our extended family.  Because it was something that even the youngest among us could join, we played a game of charades one night, with submissions from all participants that were drawn out each turn.  I only remember one that my father tried to get us to guess, miming playing a piano as an extra hint.

“What do I always say?” he asked when we were stumped.

And then: of course.  He was fond of saying that a piano is what makes a house a home, and that was the word.

And now ours is.