Ellen Notbohm
The Piano’s Choice
Such a sweet dilemma: my new job would pay an annual bonus. Save or spend? Need or want? Practical or fanciful? The first year, I leaned toward practical—the orthodontia I’d long felt I needed. I bore the bands and brackets of my oral hardware stoically, even through the swollen gums of pregnancy, patiently awaiting the smile of my dreams. But the following year, I chose fanciful. I wanted a baby grand piano.
Our house started life as an outbuilding for a dairy. Rooms had been tacked on over the years, and not artfully. Postage-stamp bathrooms, an unadorned fireplace gouged into a random wall, a skinny kitchen. But the living room stretched long and wide, spacious enough to accommodate eight feet of piano and bench, and the comfortable furniture to enjoy listening to and looking at it.
Finally, after twenty years of playing other people’s pianos, I would buy one of my very own. I knew what I wanted—a gently used Yamaha baby grand. I wasn’t concerned when I didn’t find what I wanted right away as I explored the half-dozen or so piano stores in town; I knew it was out there somewhere. I could hear it in my head.
After a search of some weeks, I stepped in the door of Western Piano Company. A glistening ebony Yamaha baby grand, exactly what I’d been looking for, sat off to the left, every bit as beautiful as I’d envisioned, my fantasy keyboard come to life.
But it barely registered.
Straight ahead, in the back of the store, stood another Yamaha. But this one was a console, all sleek rounded lines, elegantly contemporary, in a rich brown.
Not at all what I was looking for. And yet.
I couldn’t look away. It held me, like a tractor beam. Three steps in the door and I couldn’t move.
A salesman approached quietly, courteously, stopping a short distance off to my side. And just as quietly, he asked one of the most memorable questions of my life.
“Did that piano just choose you?”
Without hesitation, I answered, “I think it did.”
The salesman said nothing, just waited. A spell of moments passed. Then I blinked out of my stupor, looked at him and said, “This piano isn’t all what I had in mind.”
He chuckled and said it happened all the time.
When I finally moved across the showroom to the piano, opened the fallboard, touched the keys, swooned to their voluptuous sound, I fell irretrievably in love. Please let me be able to afford this, I prayed silently. The price tag hung on the side, the number just out of sight. The salesman smiled at me and nodded. I picked up the tag. The price was within pennies of the amount of my bonus.
The walnut console piano moved into the space intended for the ebony baby grand, somehow exuding a calm confidence that things were now the way they were supposed to be. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine how I had ever imagined otherwise.
My son was born the following year, and within another year was pulling himself up to the piano bench and slapping the seat, wanting up. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in my dismayed struggles with the Chopin, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky that had come much more easily in my youth. Though it would be a while before my baby spoke (or sang) a word, he pounded the cover of a children’s songbook, Go In and Out the Window, riffling the pages to his favorites. So we sang, my piano and I. “Simple Dreams,” “Hush Little Baby,” “The Mulberry Bush,” “Pop! Goes the Weasel.”
Oh, my versatile piano! I think it knew what I really wanted to play was “Funeral for a Friend.” To release my inner Elton. The sheet music didn’t look too intimidating. Ah, but the reality. I made it, sputtering and halting, a few pages in before who’m I fooling? thoughts pinkened my cheeks.
My choosy piano never complained while my children grew, my husband and I accommodated each other’s expanding career travels, my parents aged, and my time at the piano again became a dream I kept in my back pocket. But never for a moment did I imagine myself without it. As my anchor, my touchstone, my sentry, I was emotionally tied to it with an umbilical cord of, well, piano wire.
When we moved a few years later, I didn’t trust transporting my piano to the general moving company, any more than I might have allowed my family to be crammed into a giant van amidst the other furniture and flotsam of our lives. I called a highly-recommended piano-moving company. On the appointed day, I answered the doorbell that rang on the dot of the appointed time.
Handsome and sturdy as a Basque oak, the man on our porch introduced himself as George. My eyes swept the porch, the walkway, the street. He was alone. I asked where his helper was. He said he needed no helper: “I’m a piano mover, ma’am.”
“But this one is heavy!” I said, realizing at once how foolish it sounded. What piano isn’t heavy? Still, my husband and I together couldn’t budge our 400-pound console an inch, despite his considerable strength from a lifetime of physical work.
George repeated, “I’m a piano mover, ma’am.”
Then he stepped inside and asked, “Where is she?”
She? She? How had I missed that, all these years? I fell irretrievably in love with George the piano mover.
He went to the piano—her—and leaned down, lifting the end with one hand and placing a dolly underneath. He looked up when I gasped and smiled. Again he said gently, “I’m a piano mover, ma’am.”
I followed them out the door, worrying. “But you’re parked on a hill!” The dolly wobbled under the piano like the strap-on roller skates of my childhood.
“It’s no problem. I’m a piano mover, ma’am.” In his weightlifter-gloved hands, the piano seemed to levitate into the truck, obedient, and proud to be so.
I trailed her and George to the new house, filled with the sense something subtly extraordinary was happening. George was one of the most sterling professionals I ever had (or ever would) encounter.
He’d been a piano mover since his teens. He thought it a dream job, a calling for someone strong, who loved the sound of piano music, and sensitive to the challenges of moving something both unwieldy and delicate, with many thousands of moving parts. The math and the physics of each move required a different intersection of precision and power. No room for slip-ups, when so many pianos came with precious family stories and histories.
George floated my piano up the several steps and into our new home, where she looked fabulous. Then he asked if he could play her. His artistry eclipsed anything I’d ever managed, a hundred times over. The wildly vibrant notes of something jazzy yet Joplin-esque soared celestially toward the two-story ceiling. The house and the piano were about the same age, adolescents, and George’s music couldn’t have been a more perfect introduction to each other.
“What kind of piano do you have?” I asked, entranced. When he said he didn’t have one, I went teetering to the brink of tears. This piano should be his. We could load her back in the truck and send her with him to his, clearly, better home. He laughed kindly, so sweet and gracious, saying no, he would have a piano of his own one day soon.
I watched him drive away, knowing I would never again look at my piano the same way I had only minutes before. George had passed through my life in barely an hour. But he would remain one of its most indelible cameos.
Twenty-six years have passed since George worked his musical magic. Soon we’ll be downsizing. Our next home awaits. Is it too much to hope for? I’ll call the piano company to book a move. The doorbell will ring at the appointed hour, and I’ll open the door. I’ll hear those words, that voice, and my head will swim. I’m a piano mover, ma’am.
She’s waiting for him too.
Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short prose has appeared in many literary journals, including Brevity, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Eunoia, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, and in anthologies in the US and abroad.
