Grandma's Piano

     I sat at the piano, the old black piano.  My mouth was probably hanging open, at first a little stunned, then amused.

     The Goodwife, who had only been my Goodwife for only a very few years, stood in the doorway between kitchen, hall, and living room.  She wore an apron with a little flour dust on it.  In one hand she held a pancake turner.  The other hand was on her hip, expressing her frustration, maybe even anger.

     I had just finished a tune on the old piano.  We were the third generation owner of the old black piano.  It wasn’t always black.  It had been a cherry red, I’m told.  Who refinished it and colored it black?  My mother?  She was the second owner.

     It was the piano we all took lessons on.  I would have to go to college and live without a piano in easy reach before I would truly appreciate both the lessons and the piano.  One day I would overreact in that appreciation and decide it would be nice to have a piano on every floor of the house in which I lived.  Over the course of years, I probably have owned a dozen pianos.  But this one, the old black one was special.

     It was Grandma’s piano.  She bought it new.  The story goes that she graduated from Bryn Mawr College in the first decade of the twentieth century, around 1905, I’m not sure exactly when.  She bought the new piano, on credit with a small down payment.  She had it crated and shipped to Colorado.  (Uncle Emerson told me that he recalled using that crate as sort of a playhouse when he was a kid.)

      There used to be a letter in the piano case from the dealer who sold the piano to Grandma.  The letter said they hoped Grandma would continue making payments on the piano even though she had moved out of the country.  We have lost that letter.  We thought it was deteriorating in the piano, so we put it somewhere safe.  I suspect Grandma and Granddad made those payments.

     Grandma rode the train to Colorado where her beau was employed near Fort Morgan working on the construction of the dam at Jackson reservoir.  He was living in a tent.

      I don’t know any of the particulars of the courtship or wedding.  They were married and lived in a tent with a new piano (crated or uncrated?) for some time during that first year of their married life.  I can only imagine what Grandma thought when she stepped off the train in Fort Morgan.  Was Granddad there to meet her?  Probably.  Did he arrange to have the piano moved to the tent?  What did she think as she rode across the flat treeless plain to begin making a home in a tent near the banks of the South Platte River?

      Of course there was a wedding in there somewhere, the details of which I am ignorant.  The piano’s next stop was near Riverbend on the Ferguson ranch.  It stayed there for the births of my uncle and three of my aunts.  It would move to the “home place” also near Riverbend where my mother and her youngest sister were born.  (Ethyl Ferguson, whenever she ran into my mother, always reminded her that she hadn’t been born on the Ferguson ranch, a detail Ethyl lamented.)  

     I am not sure of the piano’s next move.  It might have gone to town when Granddad and Grandma moved to South Limon.  Or it might have gone to the farm when “the folks” moved off the ranch.  It was always there in the living room of our farm house for as long as I can remember.  It was always black in my memory.

      Sometime in the seventies, Mom got a grand piano, one my brother rescued from a school in Nebraska.   She no longer needed Grandma’s piano.  I said I would take it.  No one else seemed to want it, so I got it. 

     We had a problem.  I already had a piano, probably the third one I had bought.  Two others were quickly resold after I bought them because I had no place to keep them.  This one had made a stay in Nebraska.  When I took a job in Kansas, Uncle Ricky and I loaded the piano into his pickup.  It was in a school in Nebraska where Uncle John had stored it over the summer until he could move into his new digs.  We put it in the basement apartment where I would live during my first year of teaching school.

     The Goodwife, having spent the first three months of her life in a basement apartment (probably seemed like a tent to her), decided there would be some changes made.  She found a pleasant little two-bedroom house, and we moved again. 

    With the gift from Granny, I had two pianos.  I made a decision: either my youthful desire to have a piano on every floor would be realized, or the old piano would have to go.  Have to go!?

     I lined up three friends and bought a case of beer.  We took the old piano down the cement steps to the basement at least three ways—on its wheels, on the left end, on the right end.  It was a lot of work.  We drank the beer.  The football coach about got a hernia.  Three hours later, the piano with badly scratched ends was still in the living room.  The social studies teacher caught holy hell when he got home because his wife smelled the beer and assumed we had been partying.  She refused to believe he had been doing hard labor.  I think she might have relented sometime later when she saw the piano.

            I couldn’t bring myself to discard the old piano.  I tore the old thing down, carefully charting and labeling so I could put it back together.  It was down to the main case and the harp when I dared to call my friends back.  This time I only called two, the football coach and his assistant.  (No way did I want to tangle with the social studies teacher’s wife.)  With all the stuff off, it wasn’t fifteen minutes of work to let it down the steps and then pass the major hurdle, a thirty-two inch door at the bottom of a four-foot stairway.  Plus, the doorway was at a right angle to the stairway, so you had to make a left turn at the bottom of the stairs.

     With the keyboard gone, one arm of the piano case could be hooked around the door into the basement proper and the rest of the piano had room to maneuver on the stairway to complete the left turn and it was in the basement.  I spent many happy hours reassembling the old gal, and playing it.  I could go downstairs and play without drowning out a television program.  

     I always said whoever buys the house buys the piano, but I couldn’t live up to that.  I disassembled it again and took it out of the basement when we moved from that house.  It went back to the daughter of the lady I bought it from.

     Meanwhile, Grandma’s piano took its place as the main floor piano.  It was my wont to sit and play awhile as the Goodwife prepared our supper.  So there I was playing away.

    She asked, “What’s the name of that?”  I replied.  She asked again, same question.  What?  Is she growing deaf?  I replied louder.  She asked a third time, this time, standing in the doorway, obviously angry with me.

    I said for the third time, loudly, enunciating clearly, “How Am I to Know.”

    “Well you’re playing the damn thing!” she said.

    I grabbed the music, reversed it, held it out so she could see the title, “How Am I to Know” in big black letters across the top.

     When the danger was past, we had a good laugh.  The tune and the incident are forever linked for us.

     When we moved to Fort Morgan, Grandma’s piano accompanied us there where the piano teacher’s grandchildren would gather of a weekend and be instructed in the fine art of piano playing on the same instrument that withstood her children’s attempts to become virtuosos.

     It would move back to Kansas and stay in a garage for two years until it moved to our “permanent” home  where it would stay for the next 24 years.  Our two daughters took lessons from a local teacher in her studio.  But they practiced on Grandma’s piano.  

     When we left Kansas, we parted with the piano.  It now resides in the foothills north and west of Fort Collins with Grandma’s great-granddaughter.  

     The piano has become somewhat of a record book for our family.  We lived in a few different places when the girls were growing like weeds.  I don’t know who got the idea, but whenever the girls wanted to see how much they had grown, we would swing the left end of the piano out, stand them up against the piano back, lay a ruler across their heads, make a sharpie mark at the junction of ruler and piano frame, and put the date next to the mark. 

     Like rings of a tree stump, the dated marks record the girls’ growth.  Someday years hence, will some child see the marks on the back of the piano as it is being moved yet again and say, “Hey, look at those marks.  What are they Grandma?”