After something like twenty years of talking about it, this week Laralee finally accomplished her goal of having a piano in the house. She’s been telling me for years that she actually already owns a piano, but it’s up in Idaho at one of her siblings’ houses (she “inherited” it from her parents or something). Since we don’t really have a good way to transport it from Idaho to Colorado, we’ve been piano-less for all these years.
She stumbled across an ad where a woman in town was looking to give away her piano for free. Nice! So Laralee went to see it, decided it was decent, and then worked on how to get it to our house. She called a few piano movers, who told her that it’s really super important that you use a piano mover any time you want to move a piano, because transporting such a delicate, precious instrument in, say, a (shudder) pickup truck would be ridiculous. Legs could break off! The sounding board– or whatever it’s called– could get warped. Oh, and once it’s at home, don’t put it along an outside wall because the humidity will warp everything. And don’t put it too near an air vent because moving air will cause mold and rust and fungus and herpes. It was kind of funny how all of them were very protective of an old free piano we were looking to move a few miles.
In the end, the cheapest piano mover was something like $250 so Laralee gave up on that idea. I rounded up some friends and we drove over to the woman’s house, where we loaded the piano into… wait for it… a pickup truck. Oh, and it was raining at the time. Yikes, humidity! We threw a tarp over it, hauled it across town, and had a grand old time hoisting it into the house.
Now it sits in our living room, probably quietly warping. It’s definitely out of tune; even I can tell that. So we’ll get it tuned, and I predict the piano tuner guy will tell us it needs to be tuned at least every few months for a hundred bucks a pop, because if we don’t then it’ll cause dogs to howl and whatnot. (My guess is we’ll tune it once and that’ll be it for the next decade.)
In any case, I’m happy that Laralee is happy with her piano. I sat down to play a few notes and realized just how horrible I am– I can’t even read music. I look at the staff and count up (“F-A-C-E… okay, that’s a C. Now where’s the C on the keyboard? Okay, here.”) and finally play one note, then look at the next note. Every measure takes about 30 seconds. It’s breathtaking, to be sure.
Kyra, on the other hand, sat down and immediately started playing some great music.
It’s too bad that she’s the only musical person in the family, and about to move away to college. Zack enjoys sitting there banging away on random keys, which of course is fantastic. I guess the question is whether any of the three of us will take the plunge and actually learn how to play…