Piano

We retired our old piano this week.

This was a rather melancholy moment for me.

The piano was old – manufactured around 1905, according to the man who did some work on it a couple of years ago – and I love old things.

And this particular old piano held a lot of memories for me. It belonged to my parents before it belonged to me.

When I was very young, after all the kids were in bed, my mom would sit down at the piano and play. I loved falling asleep to the sound of her music.

My mom gave me my first piano lessons on it when I was 8 years old.

I taught my first piano lessons to my younger brother on that piano. That was his one and only year of piano lessons, but I have taken credit for all his subsequent musical prowess on account of that one year.

I practiced many years worth of piano on that piano. I remember thinking one time in high school that it was during some of these practices that I was following Jesus' imperative to “not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing .” (Mt 6:3)

These last two memories may have happened in the same year.

I taught my own children their first piano lessons on this piano, some more willingly than others.

But the piano was old and had suffered many difficulties in its' latter years. A period of cold and disuse. A period (in between my parent's ownership and ours) of misuse where it lost a number of its ivories. A couple years of high humidity, a couple years of brittle dryness. These are hard on a piano, particularly this old piano. Its sound board had two major cracks and it wouldn't hold its tune any more, making any piano practicing painful to listen to – even when all the right notes were played.

So we hauled it out to make room for a different one. One that has all its ivories and an uncracked sound board.

But first we had to get it out of our neighbors' basement.

They said it hadn't be hard to get it down.

Only this time we were going in a different direction. Up is a little more challenging. And these seemed like particularly steep stairs. Stairs are always particularly steep when a piano is involved.

We enlisted the help of the musical brother (in payment for all those amazing lessons 20 years ago!) and the help of the neighbour whose wife had sold us the piano. And of course, my husband who knows how to do things.  Like hauling a piano out of a basement.

I, on the other hand, only know how to worry about how to do things. How were we going to get this thing out of the basement and up the stairs without someone ending up squashed beneath a piano? Were these ropes going to hold? Was the piano going to tip and put a hole in our neighbours' wall? Was anyone going to end up with a hernia or excruciating back pain? Oh dear, oh dear!

Long story short, the piano is currently in my living room, ready to be played. No one died or was injured. We left the house in good repair.

My husband was exhausted. He said his back was fine; it just took a lot of energy to be the “Yes, we can” guy. Probably especially when your wife is flitting about worrying and expecting anyone to die at any moment.

You'd think that I would know a thing or two about how helpful worry is by now. My brother, in relating another piano-moving story, likened the worrying owner to an irritating fly that you can't swat away because your hands are full. What would I have done if the piano had ended up on top of someone? Said “I told you so?” “I knew this would happen?” Something equally helpful?  Is hand-wringing and "voicing my concerns" really the best way to show that I care?

I don't generally think of myself as a worrier – so long as everything goes according to my plan. The obvious solution to my worrying, then, is that everybody and everything just cooperate and participate in my good plan. It's only when I come up against some resistance to this solution, or when I don't have a plan for the situation in front of me, that I begin to worry. Which is as helpful to the situation as an irritating fly.

In Luke12:25, Jesus asks his disciples: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? [or, I might add, to the life of anyone else, including a piano mover?] Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?”   

I am guaranteed obstacles in life, things or people or events I can't control. A quote I read this morning may have some insight for this predicament. Theologian Richard Rohr says, “Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them.”