The Piano

After Michelle and I were married on November 15th, 1986, at which time we were living in a rowhouse in northwest Calgary, she was able to convince her parents that it was time for them to make good on a promise.  See, like her father, Michelle had pursued two degrees; the second was education, because she'd always wanted to be a teacher like her father.  The first degree was in music composition and theory.  Michelle's major had been French horn, and her minor the flute ... but of course, as she had lived with her music teacher father and had invested herself in music and band since before puberty, she could also play piano.

Her parents had for a long time been in possession of a family heirloom, an upright grand piano made of rosewood, which dates to the mid-19th century.  It still exists, though I don't have it now.

This piano comes to my shoulder, or about Michelle's height of 5 ft. even, and weighs about 700 lbs.  We never did get an exact weight for the instrument, though looking around on the net they can weigh anywhere between 500 to 900 lbs.  So I'm splitting the difference.  It was made in Ontario somewhere around 1850 to 1860 and was afterwards transported by train to Manitoba after 1880, as an object of the Williamson family.  Eventually it came into the possession of Floyd Williamson, Michelle's father, who lived in Calgary before Michelle was born here.  I was also born here, and I can tell you, finding two people in Calgary who were both born here is no small feat.

And so, on a warm day in February 1987, this piano came into our possession.  My initial feelings about it were somewhat indifferent.  I am no musician and have never had any particular gravity for the profession.  I can sing, and I've performed as a singer before an audience more than a dozen times ... back when I had a voice.  But playing a piano was not my forte.

We lived in that rowhouse for not much longer that year, before moving into the apartment in Sunnyside.  The piano came with us, naturally, which was no mean feet because the Sunnyside apartment was a walk-up with no elevator, and we had to get this beast up three half flights of stairs.  Thankfully, it was on wheels and I was just 23 at the time, with 23-year-old friends.  And so, using six-by-twos as ramps, and a six-by-two as a brace, and a certain amount of stupidity (as I'll explain in a minute), we did at last get the piano into our apartment.

We lived in the Sunnyside apartment for, let me see ... 14 months.  In May of 1988, after many months of trying to determine if Michelle was fertile, and then if I was fertile (and this is a story of its own), we learned that Michelle was pregnant and was due the end of September.  The apartment did not allow kids, and though we asked for an exemption we were turned down.  So with the deadline approaching, we found a house on Centre Street (3808, it's still there and it looks like hell).  And moved the piano again.

Unbeknownst to us the first time, and frustratingly unbeknownst even to my father-in-law, who had only ever once had to move the piano, when he was in the army and had stronger friends than I had, pianos can be taken apart like any machine.  Somehow, this had never occurred to any of us.  I noticed the screws just before our leaving Sunnyside, and asked around, getting the answer, "Oh sure they come apart and go back together just fine."

I don't feel entirely bad about this.  In the last 30-something years, anytime I've mentioned that fact to someone, they've been surprised by it.  Anyway, getting the piano out of the apartment went a lot easier the second time — though taking a piano apart still leaves one rather unwieldy piece that weighs about 350 lbs.  Realistically, on any kind of stair, even a landing, it takes four people to handle it.

So we moved onto Centre Street and my daughter was born.  The rent was outlandish, but it had been the only place we could find in a tight market; in fact, all through August that year, we weren't sure we'd find a place.  We made a go of it for just a year, before finally we had to give it up.  The rent was a mere $750 for 1989, back when I was in university and Michelle was working in daycare, being unable to get a teaching job; still, we couldn't swing it.  And so I moved the piano a third time.

We moved into a townhouse next to Queen's Park graveyard; the rent was less, we had three bedrooms and no basement, and we were there for seven years.  All of my daughter's memories of the piano are mostly of that time.  Michelle tried to teach me some, and for a brief time I could play a recognisable version of Silent Night.

Steadily, I began to love that thing.  The marvelous wood, the ivory and ebony keys, the resonant sound, the very fact of the thing enchanted me year by year, until I really began to think of it as "mine" as much as it was Michelle's.

In September 1994, and I'm sorry I'm not going into this at this time, Michelle's multiple sclerosis stopped being in remission and over a period of about three weeks she lost all control over all four limbs.  Over the next three years, caring for her, caring for my daughter, trying to hold onto work, praying that something would change and things would improve, our lives became a raging sea.  It all came to a bitter end, the worst period of my life, between the summer of 1996 and February of 1997.  And on February 24th of '97, I and my father moved the piano for the last time into a storage shed, with all of Michelle's things, before giving the keys to her parents.  I have not seen the piano since.