Idyllic weekend…reading, exercise, and trying to buy a piano in Da Hood.
Friday night: walked around Scott Co Park for 1 1/2 hrs.
Saturday: The Piano Story.
Sunday: Church, hanging out at home.
* * *
The Piano Story:
Whitney wants a piano. She wants the kids to take piano lessons, and she’d like to start playing again herself. I dig pianos, too. Well, I like music in general.
Thing is, in order to afford one, we need to get one used. This isn’t really a problem, because lots of people move cross-country and don’t want to take their thousand pound piano with them.
Since Craigslist is your friend, Whitney found a Kawai piano for $200. This is rather like finding a BMW for $2000, from what I understand. Anyway, she tries for a week to get an appointment with this gal Robin to see the piano, but nothing. She finally calls her Friday to see if we can see it Saturday. Arrangements are made, but things seem a little sketchy. The piano’s in a very bad part of Lousiville (15th street @ W Hill), in some sort of storage facility.
At this point, my wife has not only bought the piano in her head, she’s also derived the optimum location for it in our living room, as well as the practice schedule Maria will be following when she’s 5. That is she’s got the FEVER.
I’ve had the fever. Had it many times, for everything from cars to palm pilots to cameras. Nothing can cure it except obtaining the item or convincing YOURSELF it’s not a good idea. Thus, there was no way I’m letting her do this by herself–much the same way two priests go into an exorcism. She needs a wingman.
Anyway, we piled into Yoda and head to Lousiville early Saturday, Maria in tow. Leaving her with Stu, Whitney and I head to da Hood. It’s remarkable how much Lousiville and St. Louis look alike–same structure, same gradual transition between neighborhoods. Arriving at the appointed time, the seller’s not there, and it looks like a scene out of ‘Law and Order’: Train tracks, closed-up shipping dock, and steel cargo containers arrayed around the grounds in ‘V’ formation.
Hmmm…apparently ‘storage facility’ can also mean: Steel cargo containers with padlocks in the middle of a parking lot.
So, Bella calls the gal, and she says she’ll scrambling to get someone to help her unload the cargo conatiner. The piano’s at the back. (Alarm bell #689: If you’re trying to unload something you don’t want, why’s it at the back of a cargo container?) She’ll be down by about 1pm.
Quote of the day:
Whitney: “So, should we just wait around for you down here?”
Seller: “Under no circumstances should you wait there for any length of time.”
Hoo boy.
So, we kill 90 minutes in downtown Louisville, observing that there should probably be a cliff or something at the I65 bridge–east of that, Renaissance city, west of that, postmodern Hell. We return, and the seller’s just gotten there with her really skinny 50-ish helper, and she says she’ll call back when she’s got the piano out.
Yeah, this was really not happening. I got back in the car and just started to shake my head. “Tell her to forget it,” I murmured.
“No, let’s come back one more time, " Bella replied. I’ve been there…the desire for the shiny thing was fading, but she’d already put it in our living room, so she needed time for it to sink it. So, we drove back to JTown, and sitting in her parents’ front parlor, what I’d said the night before finally hit her:
If it’s meant to be, everything will fall into place. If it’s not, then it will be OBVIOUS that it’s not.
Yeah, 6 hours of aggravation had shown: RUN AWAY!
