Scraps of Joy

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My grand piano turned 100 this year. 

Like my books and my writing, my piano is not something I would want to live without for long. I sit down to play several times a week. Life is just better after I’ve set my fingers to those keys.

The day it was delivered to our house I cried. I told The Cowboy that I had always thought I’d be an old, old white-haired lady before I’d ever be blessed with a grand piano. I sat down to play, and I cried some more. It was one of the most wonderful days of my life. 

From that day on, it has made beautiful and not so beautiful music under the hands of piano students, children, grandchildren, and many others.

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I love it when it’s time for a piano tuning, especially when the tuner takes time afterwards to play. Such wonderful music comes from the fingers of those gifted people.

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We were able to purchase the piano because of an unexpected gift from The Cowboy’s Great Uncle Nick, who lived in Whitehorse, Yukon. The Cowboy met him once, when he was about 10 years old. I only ever heard stories of this eccentric character.

We bought the piano from an elderly woman who had to move out of her home. She had inherited the piano from her parents, but had never learned to play it. Her father had been the first American player for the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the 1930’s or 40’s.

As I understand it, the piano had been acquired by her parents as a piece of furniture. Shockingly, making music was not its main required function. The woman of the house wanted it to match her French Provincial furniture, so she had the wood painted creamy white with gold trim.

When the piano came to me it was badly yellowed and smelled of cigarette smoke that took several years to waft away. But it had a great story, looked so unique, and it was all mine.

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I had no idea how old it was until last Fall when I had it tuned by a new piano tuner who became interested in its age. I was blown away when he called a few days later to say the piano was built in 1919.

In 1919, the pop-up toaster, short wave radio, and arc welder were invented. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28 that year, bringing The Great War to its official end, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had her nineteenth birthday on August 4.

Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Wilfred Laurier, Sam Steele, and L. Frank Baum all died that year.

Jackie Robinson, Nat King Cole, Eva Peron, Sir Edmund Hillary, Liberace, and Pierre Trudeau were born in 1919. 

These famous people, the first American Saskatchewan Roughrider, the elderly daughter who sold a piano she couldn’t play, and Great Uncle Nick, have passed on. But my piano is still here, linking me to bygone eras. The unknown hands that crafted this beautiful instrument have long since passed on too, but their handiwork remains, a legacy to an unknown craftsman.

A gift to me every single day.

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