Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs by Jay Farrar

Author:Jay Farrar
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2013-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

6

Rhythm of the River

RIVERBEND

Leaving New Orleans was not an easy endeavor. The city was such a pulsating anomaly of extremes. It’s the kind of place that will occupy your thoughts and will always pull you back.

On the day I was moving out of New Orleans, a profound lesson was learned—a musician’s prerequisite (Musician’s 101) kind of thing. I had picked up a hulking old Ludwig upright piano from a small town outside of New Orleans (Ponchatoula, Louisiana). There’s a tipping point in the psyche of a twenty-something-year-old, and that is when rugged individualism and the casual intent to save money that would be spent on piano movers gets replaced by the more pervasive will to live and to not get crushed attempting to move heavy old pianos.

My fiancée and I were both positioned to absorb the “low side” of the piano’s weight, while our ever-optimistic large-sized friend Keith manned the “high side” with a complex system of straps wrapped both around the piano and his full frame—all of which had us convinced that this would of course work perfectly. We only had to make it down three steps.

As the lesson unraveled, I learned that it only takes three steps to see your life and the lives of those you love flash before your eyes in an instant as the straps failed and team fiancée fell back under the unstoppable weight of a runaway upright piano. We were able to get out of the way as the momentum carried the piano a short distance before its legs buckled and brought it to a stop.

With bruises only to the piano, our pride, and our pocketbook ($150 to a piano moving company), that old piano from Ponchatoula and its particular brand of musicality lives on. It seems to be happiest when I play Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina” or when my daughter plays “Dixie” . . .

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