Bye bye to the piano

I said goodbye to over 50 years of my past today. Two men came and took away the piano. Our family got it in the 1960s and I, and my sister did our piano practice on it. Then it found its way into our house and we inflicted piano lessons on our kids too. It has been a fixture in our house every since.

It’s been rather neglected for the past few years though. It was heralded as an interesting instrument when it was launched because it used a novel, weight-saving design to mount the keys. Unfortunately this design also meant that after a while all the plastic key mountings fell to pieces giving the instrument a rather snaggle toothed appearance and making the keys not work properly. Then the felts all got sticky so that notes would play forever so for the last while it has been a nice ornament but not really useful. So we decided to get rid of it and get something more up to date that we might actually play. This was done with a heavy heart, but you have to keep moving forwards in this life.

I asked the man who took it away if it would go to a good home. I had a vision of some kind of retirement home for pianos where they could see out their days with plenty of tunes and whatnot. “Well”, he said “we’ll melt down the frame and turn the case into firelighters”. Oh well…