Driving Minnie's Piano (5 page)

^{The trailer was exchanged for
a better one after some arguing. A hot, muggy afternoon provided
the backdrop for my father, brother and me hefting the piano out of
my brother's house and into the back of the
trailer.}

^{All the while we wrestled the
piano towards the U-Haul, there were opinions from the bystanders
as to whether it would fit, this baby grand piano made by the
Miller Piano Company in 1929. Clearly, the U-Haul was not designed
for objects not rectangular. And what if it shifted while going
around a turn? Or what if my mere four-cylinder engine didn't have
the capacity to haul such weight? If you've never tried to move a
baby grand piano, you have no idea as to the mass of the cast-iron
frame inside nor the awkwardness and delicacy of this musical
instrument.}

^{We blocked it well and
buffered it with an amazing array of old blankets, rags and
cast-off clothing. In the bundle of old clothes left around in the
basement was my grandmother's and grandfather's old bathrobes that
were put into service to swaddle the piano bench. We kept the
weight positioned low and balanced in the U-Haul.}

^{Before I locked the door to
the trailer I added a New Jersey-bought surfboard to keep the piano
company. Surfboards were hard to come by in Canada and I had bought
this one at a used sporting goods store for a
song.}

^{In the morning, we climbed the
New Jersey Turnpike north with the commuters and my eye was wary of
the heat gauge, now inching its way towards the red but graciously
remaining a hairbreadth below. I told Pamela stories about my
grandmother and explained that she had died shortly after Sunyata
had been born. Minnie had been in the hospital as we drove south
from Nova Scotia through a white-knuckle ice and snow storm but we
did not arrive in time to say goodbye. I frightened Pamela by
revealing my belief that I was sure the spirit of Minnie was with
us in the trailer, somehow connected to her piano and perfectly
content to share the space with a six-foot surfboard. Minnie would
understand about the surfboard.}

^{By afternoon, we found
ourselves in a torrential downpour on the Maine Turnpike. We were
driving along, a bit too fast, on a one-lane section of the highway
under repair. I was in a line of cars, all of us going nearly sixty
miles an hour when the skies opened up. Rain poured down so hard
and fast that the windshield wipers did next to nothing to improve
visibility. I tapped the brakes ever so slightly and it felt like
there was nothing there at all. I knew I had a tractor trailer
behind me, right behind my own trailer. I knew there was a car just
ahead. There was no shoulder to pull off onto. And I noticed that
Pamela had taken off her seat belt the last time she had reached
behind her for crayons.}

^{I tapped the breaks again ever
so slightly and screamed to Pamela to put on her seat belt. I
scared her. “Please,” I added but I was still
yelling.}

^{A sudden wind came up and I
could feel the trailer behind me sway. Then the rain was blowing up
under the hood of my K car and the engine began to sputter. Still,
there was no way to turn off. The truck driver was bearing down
behind me, hitting his air horn, either complaining about my
decreased speed or warning that he was having a hard time slowing
his rig. We were all driving blind into this madness. I was sure
that if I were to stall right then, there would have been a
calamity. I couldn't comprehend how I had allowed myself to put us
in such an uncontrolled and unsafe situation. The rain and wind
conspired disaster and we were walled by concrete, left and right.
The engine faltered, sputtered again and I waited for it to stop
altogether. Already my mind was racing as to what was safest. Stay
put and pray the trucker behind us had good brakes and good driving
skills or, when the car went dead, grab the kid and run for safety
in the torrential downfall.}

^{That's when I heard a small
arpeggio of sound coming from behind. Three or four distinct notes,
barely discernible above the wind and drumming of rain on the
roof.}

^{“Did you hear that?” I asked
my daughter.}

^{“The music?”}

^{“Yes,” I
said.}

^{“Why is the piano playing
music?” Pamela asked.}

^{“It's Minnie,” I
said.}

^{And as quickly as the rain had
begun, it ceased. The engine continued to falter. I waited for the
red light to come on to tell me the engine had stalled but,
instead, it just soldiered on. The thundershower was gone and the
sun came out. Somewhere, I'm sure there was a rainbow but my eyes
were glued to the road ahead, my hands compressing the ring of the
steering wheel. The truck was still just inches behind the trailer,
obviously driven by the devil himself, moonlighting as a road hog
in a big rig in central Maine.}

^{There was no one ahead of me
now. The cars had moved on while my failing engine was holding back
half the northbound traffic on the highway. And then, at last, we
were out of the construction zone and I saw the exit ramp. We got
off the turnpike and came to a stop in the parking lot of a nearby
Sears.}

^{“I thought we were going to
die,” I said to Pamela. It was one of those things you say in
honesty to your kid that you almost immediately regret. Pamela had
been less aware of how dangerous the situation was. I had never in
my entire life found myself in a rainstorm like that one with rain
so heavy that you couldn't see a thing. I never wanted to be in
that situation again.}

^{“But Minnie was there, right?”
she said.}

^{“I think so,” I
said.}

^{“I heard her playing the
piano,” Pamela finally said out loud.}

^{By the time we had bought ice
cream and finished eating it, the car restarted beautifully and
there wasn't a cloud in the sky.}

^{At the tiny border crossing at
Milltown, New Brunswick, a young uniformed woman from the customs
office asked to look in the trailer and I showed her Minnie's
piano. “It was my grandmother's piano,” I said. “I'm taking it to
our home in Nova Scotia. She always played a song called 'Oscar the
Octopus' on it when I was a little kid.”}

^{“Is that her surfboard too?”
she asked.}

^{As if to test us again, New
Brunswick offered up a heat wave and steep hills. My engine began
to overheat badly as I crawled up one incline after the next.
Before I had left home, my father had taken me aside after he had
checked under my hood for oil leaks, brake fluid and fan belt wear.
“Your radiator is shot,” he said.}

^{“It hasn't been a problem in
Nova Scotia. We're usually more concerned with keeping things warm
than cooling them off.”}

^{He nodded his head; he
understood. “Keep an eye on your heat gauge. If it starts to go in
the red, roll down the windows and put your heater on high. Turn
the fan up full blast.”}

^{Which is the only way we could
have made it through New Brunswick. Windows fully open, heater on
high. It must have seemed absurd to Pamela but she never
complained. By keeping the interior heat on full blast, we were
pulling heat off the engine and into the car. It was like driving
through equatorial Africa but it kept the engine temperature just
barely below critical.}

^{It was a cool, drizzly and
foggy day when I asked my neighbour, an overworked psychiatrist by
profession, to come over with his two largest teenage sons to help
me heft the piano into my house. All logical methods failed us. We
needed to carry it up a steep hill and into the back door of a
house never designed to allow for easy piano
transport.}

^{Standing it on its side with
legs removed, we resorted to rolling it very gingerly end over end
over rock and slippery moss and eventually into the back door. Legs
were affixed and it was settled into place by a window facing
south. Minnie's piano had arrived.}

^{King of the Drumlins}

^{On the first day of November
there are no tourists at Lawrencetown Beach. On this early morning,
the sky is grey, the sea is grey, and a daunting wind is pulling in
from the northeast. Small sparrows cling to the sea oats and the
dune grass is brown. It is a good time to be alone here and I have
no regrets about the approach of winter.}

^{There is no sand left upon the
beach. Recent storms have washed it all offshore, where it has
formed undersea dunes that actually protect what's left of the
beach from being pummelled by the biggest waves. The sandbars
diffuse the power of winter storm waves and when the storms of
winter decrease, the sand migrates ashore to provide a warm white
beach for summer swimmers to spread their towels
upon.}

^{I own a few acres of land on
the headland at the west end of the beach. A few brave steepled
spruce trees grow among the wild roses and grasses. Aside from the
sparse spruce, the hills are mottled red and brown. If rose hips
were dollars, I'd be a very wealthy man. Once a frame house stood
on that land but there is nothing left of it except for a rubble of
stone that was once a foundation and patches of tiger lilies
planted long ago and eventually forgotten by all but me. Right now
my goal is to do nothing with the land but pay my taxes on behalf
of the roses and lilies and leave it otherwise alone, a
geographical postcard of acreage I am sending intact into the next
century.}

^{The land and sea around me,
the marsh and the bedrock hill my house sits upon - all counter my
ambition. Back in New Jersey, light-years ago in my life, ambition
blossomed in me and I took off on a wild pursuit. University
degrees and knowledge and rebellion and craving and longing,
jealousy and a kind of greedy desire to accomplish things took
hold.}

^{Ragged, sometime raging,
ambition met the cold, clean heart of the North Atlantic and they
hammered out a pact with one another. Years down the line, however,
ambition would continue to muscle away at the large solemn truths
of wind and wave and the deepening cold of the coming
winter.}

^{I am not sure how others
remain sane but sanity for me is a gift of a great grey sky, the
small satisfaction of ground-creeping juniper among old round rocks
covered by green, yellow and orange lichen. Over the years, the
lichen, most primitive of living things, has somehow leapt from the
stones on the ground by the house and now grows in small patches on
the asphalt shingles I nailed to my roof. How this is possible, I
don't know. Each patch of roof lichen is a small garden feeding on
rain and whatever sustenance available - motes of dust driven by a
west wind, perhaps. What is the lifespan of lichen? I wonder. My
guess is that the community of lichen here will live on long after
I have given up my roost on this hill above the
sea.}

^{The ruin of e-mail is that
information comes fast and often from all corners of the personal
and impersonal world. News of a former classmate from high school,
diminished to seventy pounds by bone cancer, dying in a bed in New
Jersey not far from the town where I grew up. Her name was Karen
and I can't say we were the best of friends or in love or any of
that. We shared French class and Biology and English and she wore
black-rimmed glasses like other girls back then. She was very smart
and she was also a cheerleader, which doesn't seem to be the way it
should fit together, but it did.}

^{Our lives are compact and
cluttered at once. We ferret out meaning in all the small details
of the day and miss the important messages, I'm
sure.}

^{In the spruce forest above my
house is a small graveyard of pets that have come and gone over the
years. A dog, several parakeets, pigeons, hamsters, injured gulls,
geese and seabirds that stayed with us until they died. Burying
things beneath trees required skill at digging around important
roots, cutting through lesser ones with pick axes, digging deep
enough so roaming coyotes (there are a few here), bobcats or foxes
won't dig up the small winged or furry dead.}

^{The top layer of the forest
floor is ten inches of decomposing spruce needles. Beneath that,
the soil is black and compact with medallions of stones left behind
by retreating glaciers. Not too far down - two feet, maybe three -
is bedrock. Having dug animal graves and also a well for my old
homestead, I can tell you what it feels like to drive a pick axe
into solid bedrock. I can tell you it is an admonition that one has
dug deep enough, that a digger is allowed to work away with hand
tools at the thin layer of land above the rock, but he will stop
when the tip of iron tries to puncture the solid bones of the
earth.}

^{Awful centuries of history are
now part of who I am, a price paid by research and donning the
cloak of occasional historian. I know more about the history of
this province than I would like to and wish I could return to
innocence. Arriving here for the first time in a summer in the
early 1970s, I believed I had washed up on the shores of paradise.
Years later, in flight from aforementioned ambition and the
hostility of urban worlds, I held onto my mythology as long as I
could. Even now, I prefer to ignore, if I can, the knowledge of
this province's military past filled with inglorious battles
between empires, scalping of Mi'kmaq people by British soldiers and
all the remaining clouds of injustice that hover over this
land.}