A Piano Fool

“When I met and married you, we had two pianos and a clavichord all of those 14 years, and my nourishment by Piano continued unabated. If you are what you eat, I am made of Piano. Even when I quit tuning and turned to writing, editing, and gardening instead, the pianos were still here. And more recently when you stopped playing because your eyes had gotten so bad, these mute instruments kept quietly sending out their essence into our house, staining the walls, keeping the air molecules properly trembling.”–Anita Sullivan 

The Highest Cauldron

By Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—12/8/2014—Dear Ted,

Your Bluthner grand piano is going out the door tomorrow, on its way to a new owner. This is part of the enormous dismantling process that I seem to be orchestrating, ever since your death almost exactly two months ago. I don’t know why I have felt driven to so actively and vigorously—what shall I say, expunge? destroy? shatter? —my old life with you, rather than gently presiding over a slower and more organically normal process of dissipation, decay and renewal.

Some of it may come from a subconscious loyalty. That is, when a person dies and leaves behind material evidence of his life in every way other than his own physical presence, it’s necessary for the survivors to “do something” with all that material—clothes, papers, furniture, favorite keepsakes—and much of it has to be essentially “neutralized” by being sold or given away. This dreary process feels almost impossible to carry out at all, much less quickly: as if after seeing you through your normal death I am now committing murder as well. So, I do a little self-destruction on the side, to compensate.

Some spouses, parents, children—can’t bring themselves to begin this process for months or years after someone they love dearly has died. But I have always been the kind of person who is the opposite of a procrastinator: I do the most difficult, distasteful, grungy things a little ahead of time, “lest a worse fate befall me.” I think I’m always afraid I will collapse and not be able to cope, so I cope like hell in advance. Now I have transferred that habit to the circumstance of your death: I am willfully hastening the dissolution of my own life to keep pace with your own so recent quick decline. Also, so that I can emerge more quickly into whatever wasteland may be waiting for me on the other side of it, and start turning that wasteland into something of my own devising.

Still, it seems to me tonight that giving up the Bluthner is more than that. This gorgeous six-foot-two-inch German-made grand that you bought sight unseen over 30 years ago merely by hearing it over the phone, is and was your piano, never mine. Even though I have taken to playing it a little during the several weeks since your death, just for short spells as much as I can bear, even so, it is not really my piano. Somewhat to my surprise, that turns out not to be the point at all.

Just like you, for most of my life I have had a piano in my house, and for most of that time the piano was not really “mine.” First was when I was a child spending time at my grandmother’s house in Troy, New York, and her little Kurtzman grand sat in the front parlor among the maroon drapes, the Persian rug, the glass-fronted cabinet full of ivory and glass and wooden figurines, the dark chairs with the intricately-carved animal faces and patterned upholstery. I don’t remember hearing my grandmother actually play that piano, but it was always there, the lid down and some sort of drapery gracefully tossed across the top (since this was a house in which every surface was covered with some kind of “Old World” piece of craftsmanship, many which my grandmother had made herself on loom, kiln, easel, or broad work table).

I can’t truly say there was “always” a piano in the house as I grew up; I only remember a series of dark old uprights on which I reluctantly plunked away, preparing for my piano lessons. But if we skip forward to my adult years as a piano tuner, it was as if I were then finally dunked into a full sea of “piano-ness,” which in my earlier life had merely been a small pond. Surreptitiously, The Piano took over my life and held me up for years without my truly realizing it. This had nothing to do, really, with whether or not I actually owned any of these instruments, which I mostly did not.

Even my grandmother’s piano, which in my 40s came to live with me for awhile, was on loan from my cousin, who had rightfully inherited it. Sam and I restrung it, refinished it, put new hammers on it, simply as an act of love. Eventually, at my cousin’s request we sold it because she didn’t have room for a grand piano in her New York apartment. But for a number of years this was the piano in the house, the one my two sons heard every day and sometimes lay down underneath when I was playing it—never mind to whom it actually belonged. Later, while I lived alone in a two-room apartment without a proper shop available for action work, I crowded a different grand piano into my living room, next to the large table that served as my eating place and workbench.

I went out every day to work on pianos, and came home to a piano-full house. I remained, from those far away days to this one, fully immersed, soaked, saturated and not squeezed out—with Piano.

When I met and married you, we had two pianos and a clavichord all of those 14 years, and my nourishment by Piano continued unabated. If you are what you eat, I am made of Piano. Even when I quit tuning and turned to writing, editing, and gardening instead, the pianos were still here. And more recently when you stopped playing because your eyes had gotten so bad, these mute instruments kept quietly sending out their essence into our house, staining the walls, keeping the air molecules properly trembling.

Now that is all about to end. I had not meant to bring about a finality of this magnitude. I had not realized, when I took hold of this particular thread, to find that it unraveled so very much. Will I be like the sheep in the cartoon, who is knitting a sweater out of her own wool, replacing one version of herself with another? The caption on this comical figure says, “To Someone of Rare Ingenuity and Resourcefulness.” I think, in this case, “rare headstrong foolishness” might be more accurate.