Dating : The Saga of the Piano That Love Bought

Once upon a time in the early 1920s, a beautiful upright piano was born. She had real ivory keys, a responsive touch, and a rich warm voice.

Over the years many different people painted her with many different colour schemes. Then over more years, the paint chipped away here and there and revealed a patchwork of these different colour schemes. Her patchwork chic was…distinctive.

The many layers of paint helped give her her distinctive resonant voice.

Eventually she belonged to a man who had a big loft in a blue-collar neighbourhood of San Francisco and who enjoyed giving salon concerts in his loft, starring the piano. But over time the blue-collar neighbourhood became a breeding ground of multi-million-dollar tech startups, and the salon concert man had to leave.

It cost too much to move the piano so he left it in his loft, which was now the home of a multi-million-dollar tech startup. But they didn’t want to have to deal with it, so after letting it collect enough dust, they put it on Craigslist.

Meanwhile

I lived in Manhattan and when I moved in with my boyfriend, he bought me an electronic keyboard. I played a lot of Bach on it. Then we moved to San Francisco and brought the keyboard with us.

We got married and had a baby. I didn’t play much when I had a baby to take care of.

But then the baby got bigger and I played the keyboard and I gave a lot of salon concerts of all different kinds in our beautiful home.

One day the keyboard died.

I assumed I was going to live in my beautiful home forever, with my husband and my child, giving salon concerts, and investing in a piano would be a safe thing to do. I was feeling rich, because I had just hosted a successful concert the night before the keyboard’s death. A uniquely-minded multi-instrumentalist had charmed all of us with a lovely evening of music.

Meanwhile I had also just sold the multi-instrumentalist a print of a painting I’d done of his mother, for him to give her as a present. I had a lot of admiration for the whole family, all of them brilliant and idiosyncratic, but I particularly looked up to this woman, once a Broadway Baby, now a spiritual leader, who was in a class of her own.

I looked on Craigslist and saw this piano listed but wasn’t sure, because I had assumed I would buy something in light wood that would match the living room.

I asked the advice of an old friend of mine, who had also been my second kiss ever, and who now played violin and mandolin in local groups. He pointed out the same ad, so I went to go see it.

So There in the Startup Loft

I saw her sitting, dusty and ignored in a corner, and she reached out to me and grabbed my hands and pulled me down to play her. From the moment I first heard her voice I fell in love with her. She had Soul. She knew about life. Her notes vibrated in my heart and I knew she was the piano for me and I would have none other, no matter what.

I measured her and she would fit into the lift at home with exactly one inch on every side to spare. I asked the guys how much to get her to my place: they said exactly the amount of money I had just earned from selling the print and from my cut of the salon concert.

She came home with me.

That first day, I played Scott Joplin and sheet music from the 1900s on her. My son investigated the inner workings of the strings and hammers.

Then I broke my toe on her, two hours after she’d come home, because she took up five more inches of real estate than the keyboard she’d replaced, which I didn’t realise when running for the kitchen. I couldn’t dance for two months, so I played a lot of piano.

We enjoyed a lot of salon concerts together, she and I. There was a world premiere of a new half-Chinese, half-Californian piece, and there was the concert of the prodigy son of my lover the flamenco guitarist, and there was the gypsy jazz band, and there was a lot of love.

The love of my life, who had been the grandson of the President of Ecuador when we had met twenty years ago, finally became my lover, except now instead of being the richest and most powerful teenager in his country, he was a penniless architect and new father in Canada, and I played the piano to deal with that.

I made a lot of music videos with that piano.

One time I almost died and played a lot of piano as music therapy afterward.

I lost my husband, I lost my beautiful home, and I had to leave California. I moved to Seattle so I could still be kind of near my son, and I brought the piano with me, because I assumed I was going to live in Seattle forever.

It was like bringing a pet.

Seattle

I suffered at graduate school, which was all computers all the time, and I was all alone. There were only four other people in my program who spoke English and I didn’t like them. Everyone else had come straight from China and had cheated on the language exam. I couldn’t do my work, even with tons of extra help and tons of extra effort. I handled this by playing through the entire Beethoven Sonata series on my piano.

I fell in love for a third time with a man who had crushed my heart into shrapnel twice before. He had not done so intentionally, which only made it hurt more. I played and recorded the entire Rachmaninoff Variations on a Theme by Paganini for him on my piano and then he broke my heart again, as unintentionally as he had done in the past, so I did not share the recordings with him.

I got the piano freshly retuned and refelted directly before going to Russia for a couple of weeks, because I assumed I was just going on Spring Break, but then the day I got back from Russia, my grandmother died and I quit school.

I put everything into storage and left Seattle and went on an international odyssey.

And Now It’s Your Turn

I never expected to emigrate to Europe but that is exactly what happened. I, the woman with the five storage containers full of Home, was now the woman building a new life with only what could come over in two suitcases.

I hoped that money would fall out of the sky and I would be able to bring my things over, but no money fell out of the sky.

So now it’s my turn to let go of the Piano That Love Bought. I hope she will bring you as much happiness and love as she has brought me.