The Piano

A friend in Saratoga -- one of the first people my husband Jim and I met when we moved here a little more than four years ago -- asked us recently how we met. She said she'd heard us talk about Hawai'i, Minneapolis, Muncie, and Seattle but wasn't sure when we were tied to those places or if we were there together at the same time. Her query dovetailed really nicely with today's prompt from StoryADay, which was to write an epistolary story. What follows is not quite a love letter but a story of love and so here goes.

It was the last Monday in June, 2004, June 28, to be exact. (Thank goodness for the iPhone calendar, which can take one back to any date in time.) I was working on my doctorate and, at age forty-one, had decided it was time to get married. To whom? That was unknown. But time was ticking. I had lived out my life as a happy-go-lucky single woman and no longer wanted to be alone. For the past two or three years, I had dated a number of people and was having a good time. But I wanted to go past the good time. I wanted a partner, a spouse. To settle down.

The day before I had been in a personal development seminar where I had been asked to set a 90-day goal. The goal had to be SMART, meaning that it had to be specific, measurable, attainable, risky, and reached within the 90-day timeline. The facilitator of the seminar emphasized the word "risk" as an essential component of growth so I decided that setting a goal of finding the right person for me wasn't risky enough. The facilitator suggested I set a goal of being married within three months, but that was, well, too risky. So I decided I would be engaged.

I was writing the morning after in my favorite coffee shop. As I left, I wondered idly if the next man I saw would be The One. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jim -- a rather good-looking guy who appeared to be physically fit and equipped with a MacIntosh laptop and a mountain bike. My type. Only I didn't give it a second thought. My mind was preoccupied with setting up an account on an Indian dating site called Shaadi.com. Given my experience of being the daughter of Indian immigrant parents who had long insisted I should have an arranged marriage, I figured that no one could understand the expediencies of meeting, liking and getting engaged in a 90-day time frame better than Indians.

En route to my apartment, about a block and a half from the coffee shop, I noticed that a storefront style Korean church had left a piano out on the curb. I had played piano in my childhood through high school and often fantasized about taking up the instrument again. But to be honest I wasn't really that interested in playing the piano. Yet, to leave one out on the curb, to be picked up and taken to the dump, that seemed inappropriate, somehow.

I found myself walking back to the coffee shop, where I asked one of the baristas who happened to be taking a break outside if he knew anyone who could help me move a piano down the block and across the street. He was shaking his head, as I had anticipated, but the good-looking man whom I had noticed earlier sprung to attention. "I can help you with that." He asked someone sitting with him if they'd watch his laptop and mountain bike and headed over.

He was quite strong, and managed to heave the piano the required distance, leaving it in my parking stall and refusing my offer to buy him lunch as a token of appreciation. Later, I learned that he thought I was slightly off my rocker and that he wanted to get away from me as fast as he could. He returned to the coffee shop with the intention of complaining about "that crazy woman" only to discover that everyone who worked at that coffee shop knew me and liked me quite a bit. So he modulated his actions, and as coincidence would have it we began running into each other periodically.

As for the piano, I found a mover who was willing to heave it up the four flights to my apartment, and as for Shaadi.com, I almost immediately connected on that site with someone who seemed like the ideal match: same age as me, born in the U.S. of Indian parents, creative, athletic, hard-working, and fond of Hawai'i. Only, as it turned out, he was obsessed with the fact that I had been in a long-term relationship in the past and was a vegan. The latter point didn't particularly bother me, but the fact that I didn't have an issue with people who ate meat bothered him somehow.

Over about six or seven days, we spoke over the phone numerous times. Somewhere in the midst of that time span, the good looking man at the coffee shop asked me if I'd like to go running with him. He suggested the Tantalus loop, which is an 11-mile loop up and down a mountain through a tropical rainforest. Not exactly something I'd imagine to constitute a date.

I agreed to do the run with him on a Sunday morning. The Thursday before, I had a long conversation with the ideal man from Shaadi.com. The conversation ended with me feeling convinced that if I married this guy I would have to become a vegan, a fairly submissive woman who enacted Hindu rituals with humility and grace around his mother at least, and never see my ex-partner again. The latter point especially grieved me because my ex- had become one of my best friends. But I was resolved to get married, and decided that I could convince myself that these conditions of matrimony would not be so bad. Still, I had dinner alone at my favorite pasta restaurant and drank three glasses of wine.

Friday came with a hot blazing sun and a bit of a bleary feeling.

I sat in the coffee shop writing my morning pages, resolving to make my life plan.

My cell phone rang. Jim, the good looking man from the coffee shop, was calling to inform me that he had broken his foot while buying cigarettes and couldn't run Tantalus, as a result. He wanted to know if I wanted to go out for dinner and a movie instead.

I suddenly realized that he was asking me out on a date, and almost simultaneously I realized that I wanted to go. It would be a last chance to be single, I convinced myself, to live out my free-and-easy independent life before disappearing into a marriage with Mr. Indian Right.

To make a long story short, Jim and I had a great time on our first date, and went out again two days later. I had one more phone conversation with the man from Shaadi.com during which I told him first politely and then later quite pointedly that his obsession with my prior romantic life, my dietary habits, and my attitude toward religion were just not conducive to a long-term relationship. Jim managed to propose to me informally within the 90-day time frame and we got married about a year and a half later.
         
As for the piano, it moved with us from Honolulu to Seattle. Something happened to the keys in transit, which caused most of them to stick. As a result, the piano served more as a prop for holding Christmas, birthday, and anniversary cards as well as family photographs than anything else. When I received an offer to take a professor position in upstate New York, we decided we would gift the piano to a neighborhood friend, Robert. He managed to repair the keyboard and played the piano sporadically before selling it to a family with children taking piano lessons following the death of his elderly mother. My mother had long promised me that I would inherit the family piano, but when the time came last fall for her and my father to downsize, I suggested that the piano would get more use and more value if it were given instead to her grandchild, who is showing real signs of musical talent.

Thinking about the story of how my husband and I met caused me to wonder why it took a piano -- an 800-pound monstrosity of an instrument -- to bring us together. Although I had enjoyed playing the piano as a teen, I had not touched one in about thirty years. Jim had no background or interest in playing the piano either. Yet, that was our bond, our connective thread, until we decided some five years into our marriage that we really needed no bond. We had each other. That was enough.