...Finally Learning Patience at Last (Once Again) with the Help of a Broken Piano
Posted by Steven Wingate at 3/26/2008 12:19 AM and is filed under musical repairs,Church,false assertions of patience,shaking your ass,Patience,pianos 
Those of you who know me—heck, probably 90% of the people who are going to read this—know that (a) it’s my birthday today! and (b) I’m not much of a Mr. Fix-It guy because I’m not a very patient kind of guy. Apparently this is a genetic trait; I learned to swear by being near my dad while he worked on cars and did household repairs, and no doubt my sons are doing the same.
As well they should, dammit! Shouldn’t boys learn to swear from their fathers? There are two kinds of boys in the world—those who learn to swear from their fathers and those who learn to swear from strangers, and I bet that any scientific study worth its salt would reveal that those boys who learn from their fathers grow up far better adjusted. Better citizens, less likely to beat their own wives and kids, etc.
Geez, that would be an expensive study. Somebody out there have the bucks to commission it? A tobacco company, something like that?
Anyway, the point of this blog posting is that I’m finally learning patience after 43 years on this planet, thanks mostly to an electric piano (Yamaha P-60, 2003 model) that came into my hands through some odd kismet about six months ago. I had just told my mother-in-law that I wanted to get back into playing music, the piano specifically, and it just so happened that the next day she found one. Joanne G. is an avid aficionado of the thrift store Savers, and scouts it out around closing time on the night before her senior discount will apply. Then she shows up in the morning, uses that senior discount, and goes home overjoyed at her bargain-hunting abilities.
Well it just so happened that she found the Yamaha P-60 at Savers, called us, and said she wanted to buy it as a gift. The next day we cleared a little space and had a piano. Woo hoo! For the first week I played it every day, sometimes every few hours, until I got super-busy and ignored it for a week. Then, when I played it again, I found that twenty-one keys clustered around middle C stuck dreadfully, and showed little sign of improvement when I cleaned them with alcohol as the piano store suggested.
The keys never unstuck, and eventually I stopped playing. I guess that while the piano was at Savers (and while I played it every day) its stickiness was held in abeyance (ooh, I love that word) by regular use. Once I stopped being obsessed with it, the problem came back. Eventually I just couldn’t press the keys down at all and decided that I had to either (a) take the damn thing apart and see what was wrong, or (b) ditch it altogether.
Well….
Nine days ago I was in church, singing along to a song in the missal I had never heard before and having, for the briefest of moments, the impression that I could read music like I used to. My mouth followed the notes exactly, and I didn’t even have to wait for the musicians to sing it first the way I usually do when I try to follow along.
For a bar and a half, I actually was reading music. Then my brain got involved—obtrusive jerk that he/she/it is—and the feeling crashed down on me. But when I got home I decided Dammit, I’m cleaning that damn piano today regardless of how long it takes or how many hours it deprives me of my family’s presence. So I took the thing apart, utterly ignoring all the instructions in the owner’s manual, and discovered the problem. Somebody had spilled a can of soda through the keyboard, which had not only gunked up the keys but completely destroyed a swath of the foam padding against which the metal hammers of the weighted keys struck.
Now you can’t take apart the key mechanisms on your average junky synth, but this was not a junky synth by any means. The more I took it apart, the more I respected it. The more I cleaned the soda and foam off with alcohol swabs and cotton baby wipes, the more I realized that cleaning the piano would open not only the door of music for me, but the door of patience, the door…....
Ah, what bullshit! Patience! I’m not even patient enough to write this damn blog. Every time I try to work on it, I want to turn off the computer and go play the piano. So play the piano, Steve! It’s just a blog! No one will think worse of you if you just go play the piano like you want to, and no one will think better of you if you stick it out to the end of this posting and try to create a nice, neat narrative arc.
So to heck with this posting. Who cares if it’s full of typos, too. I’m going to play my piano, dammit! It’s my damn birthday! All I ask of you is that you imagine me playing that piano so well that you have no choice but to get up and shake your ass. And I don’t mean just a little shimmy. I mean shake it, as God, the Caesars of Rome, and the United States Constitution intended. Yeah!
As well they should, dammit! Shouldn’t boys learn to swear from their fathers? There are two kinds of boys in the world—those who learn to swear from their fathers and those who learn to swear from strangers, and I bet that any scientific study worth its salt would reveal that those boys who learn from their fathers grow up far better adjusted. Better citizens, less likely to beat their own wives and kids, etc.
Geez, that would be an expensive study. Somebody out there have the bucks to commission it? A tobacco company, something like that?
Anyway, the point of this blog posting is that I’m finally learning patience after 43 years on this planet, thanks mostly to an electric piano (Yamaha P-60, 2003 model) that came into my hands through some odd kismet about six months ago. I had just told my mother-in-law that I wanted to get back into playing music, the piano specifically, and it just so happened that the next day she found one. Joanne G. is an avid aficionado of the thrift store Savers, and scouts it out around closing time on the night before her senior discount will apply. Then she shows up in the morning, uses that senior discount, and goes home overjoyed at her bargain-hunting abilities.
Well it just so happened that she found the Yamaha P-60 at Savers, called us, and said she wanted to buy it as a gift. The next day we cleared a little space and had a piano. Woo hoo! For the first week I played it every day, sometimes every few hours, until I got super-busy and ignored it for a week. Then, when I played it again, I found that twenty-one keys clustered around middle C stuck dreadfully, and showed little sign of improvement when I cleaned them with alcohol as the piano store suggested.
The keys never unstuck, and eventually I stopped playing. I guess that while the piano was at Savers (and while I played it every day) its stickiness was held in abeyance (ooh, I love that word) by regular use. Once I stopped being obsessed with it, the problem came back. Eventually I just couldn’t press the keys down at all and decided that I had to either (a) take the damn thing apart and see what was wrong, or (b) ditch it altogether.
Well….
Nine days ago I was in church, singing along to a song in the missal I had never heard before and having, for the briefest of moments, the impression that I could read music like I used to. My mouth followed the notes exactly, and I didn’t even have to wait for the musicians to sing it first the way I usually do when I try to follow along.
For a bar and a half, I actually was reading music. Then my brain got involved—obtrusive jerk that he/she/it is—and the feeling crashed down on me. But when I got home I decided Dammit, I’m cleaning that damn piano today regardless of how long it takes or how many hours it deprives me of my family’s presence. So I took the thing apart, utterly ignoring all the instructions in the owner’s manual, and discovered the problem. Somebody had spilled a can of soda through the keyboard, which had not only gunked up the keys but completely destroyed a swath of the foam padding against which the metal hammers of the weighted keys struck.
Now you can’t take apart the key mechanisms on your average junky synth, but this was not a junky synth by any means. The more I took it apart, the more I respected it. The more I cleaned the soda and foam off with alcohol swabs and cotton baby wipes, the more I realized that cleaning the piano would open not only the door of music for me, but the door of patience, the door…....
Ah, what bullshit! Patience! I’m not even patient enough to write this damn blog. Every time I try to work on it, I want to turn off the computer and go play the piano. So play the piano, Steve! It’s just a blog! No one will think worse of you if you just go play the piano like you want to, and no one will think better of you if you stick it out to the end of this posting and try to create a nice, neat narrative arc.
So to heck with this posting. Who cares if it’s full of typos, too. I’m going to play my piano, dammit! It’s my damn birthday! All I ask of you is that you imagine me playing that piano so well that you have no choice but to get up and shake your ass. And I don’t mean just a little shimmy. I mean shake it, as God, the Caesars of Rome, and the United States Constitution intended. Yeah!
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