Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

Life Sketches: Five Easy Pieces and a Spinet

Awhile back my good friend and chicken guru, Jim McNulty, called to tell me that he had found the piano of his dreams: “a Winter spinet for free!” It was down in Middlefield and he wanted to know if he could have the use of my truck to bring it home. I told him about a terrible time two friends and I had had getting an old piano out of a basement because it was so heavy and the stairs up were steep and narrow.

“I got plenty of help,” Jim countered. “Billy Donnelly’s coming, my son-in-law, Bill Bowers and Reinhardt Erdman. Including you, that would make five of us.”

“That might do it,” I said.

But, I really didn’t think so. My wife, Alice, told me to call Jim back and tell him to draft some younger guys, but I told her I had already agreed while picturing a congregation of our Over-The-Hill-Gang favoring one ailment or another. A story about my old friend George Horrigan came to mind. He had bought a large piece of antique furniture, an oak dresser, I think it was, from a fussy guy over in West Winfield who kept telling him not to do any damage. George was in the process of moving it down a flight of stairs with the guy breathing down his neck and repeating, “Careful now!” When it became impossibly wedged between the wall and the banister, my friend struggled for a long time to free it, but without success. His back started to hurt, so he decided to take a break. That’s when I ran into him having a beer back at The Park Inn in Richfield Springs. When he described his predicament, I asked, “How are you going to clear the guy’s stairway?”

“I’m not,” George said after downing a long swig of Genesee beer and stretching his back from side to side. I pictured the fussy guy back in West Winfield sitting at the top of his stairs waiting for George to return.

When the piano moving day arrived, there was an added pressure. Our friend, Barbara Smith, had invited a professional pianist to town to give an informal concert on the handsome Baldwin upright in her parlor. She wanted all of us to attend. The performance would begin at one o’clock sharp, which required us to push moving the piano an hour ahead. We had two hours to get it from Middlefield to McNulty’s. If we were late, Barbara, not to mention the pianist, would be very disappointed.

Following a musical motif, Donnelly showed up for the move with a Blues Brothers hat on. Bowers came along with a come-along. Rheinhardt was already limping and an eager McNulty was impatiently strutting around like a rooster. We headed out in two vehicles. I pictured us all later, a bunch of Bassett cases trying to bargain with the hospital for a group rate on hernias.

As luck would have it, the piano was on the ground floor and a lot lighter than many of today’s chipboard pianos. Two side notes and the long pedal were down, but the hammers looked good and the rest of the ivory keyboard was level with no chips. Most of the weight would come from the metal harp that a piano is built around. The owner, a 30-year-old woman, was nearly in tears as we raised one side of the spinet to put it on a dolly. She said that her mother had bought the piano for her when she was a little girl. Now, she never played and it was taking up needed space. To my surprise, the five of us easily got it onto the truck, but on the way home we had to stop one time to lift the piano that had tilted onto McNulty’s lap as he sat on a bench in back of the pickup pecking out a one-fingered version of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

When we dropped the Winter off at McNulty’s and headed for Barbara’s, I was expecting to hear guest pianist, Drew De Four, play “Five Easy Pieces.” Instead, he dazzled us with music that ranged from Rachmaninoff to Jerry Lee Lewis. There was some heavy, serious stuff at the beginning and then the joint was jumping! The six foot seven, 28-year-old De Four was all over the keyboard. He was a gazelle and a jaguar. He played a lot of blues, ragtime and stride style jazz. He made that piano talk—at times with his elbows and his socked feet. He sang many of his own tunes. Two hours flew by like two minutes. McNulty was inspired and eager to get his “new” Winter into perfect working condition. The very next day he would call to have his ailing keys “glooed”—that is, put right, by local piano tuner, Eric Gloo. The move and the concert wound up to be a serendipitous Sunday which we all came through in one piece—except for the fussy guy in West Winfield who I imagined was still waiting at the top of the stairs for George.

Terry Berkson’s articles have appeared in “New York” magazine, “Automobile” magazine and many others. His memoir, “Corvette Odyssey,” has received many good reviews: “highly recommended with broad appeal,” says “Library Journal.”