Life With Objects

The piano that I love has a chip in the stained ivory at the end of the key at Middle C. I cannot say for certain where it came from. It might have been my doing when little; when I felt loud, the piano could be loud too. I only discovered later that pounding my fists on its’ keys did more physical harm than cathartic good. Perhaps it was my mother, or a moving accident, or her aunt when she was learning to play, or perhaps some incident farther back that created the chip. I suppose I will never know.

You cannot hear this, but I am tapping Middle C. It is a white note, a key in the middle of the keyboard, just under the piano maker’s logo. This is where most of my songs begin. I will wander up and down the keyboard in major and minor variations, depending on where my heart is at the moment—marches when happy and dearths when sad—I will always start with my right thumb on Middle C.

Pianos, I think, belong to a select group of nostalgia. They last several lifetimes, passed from generation to generation of players. Sometimes, as I sit at my piano, I marvel at this hulk of wood and metal—this object—that has entertained families and singalongs, frustrated young fingers, wooed a few ladies, and been host to the best and worst songs ever imagined. I think about how much time the family I know has spent sitting in the very place I am sitting, touching the same keys that I am touching.

This piano has been handed down through at least three generations of my family to wind up in my room in a house not too far from the city. I only know a small part of its travels; that it moved from my great aunt’s house to all of my childhood homes, until finally my parents had no more room for it. This is the piano my great aunt played when the world was at war; this is the piano my mother played as her aunts raised her; this is the piano my father played as he grappled with his greatest failure—this is now the piano I play in the best and worst of times.

I will pass this piano down to my children one day. I hope that they will have the same fond memories of growing up, hearing it echo in the halls of their childhood home. I hope it will be the same completely new discovery for my children as it was for me. They will find their own way to play it, create their own memories around it, and wonder where that tiny chip in the ivory at the end of the key at Middle C came from. Until then, I will keep it for them here in my room in a house just outside the city.

Consider the weight of a player piano. Now consider it again in the 1930’s, when everything seemed to weigh a bit more than it does now. The player piano was a gathering point, like the televisions of today; families would sit around it, making a joyful noise. All the affluent homes in East Grand Rapids owned one until the affordable radio took over the waves.

Now consider the strength it takes to bury a 1930 player piano in a lake.

There are pianos buried in Reeds Lake, the long forgotten home of Ramona Park and its Jack Rabbit Derby Racer roller coaster. Home of the Ramona Theatre Pavilion, where Buster Keaton gave them “The Great Stone Face,” George Burns told jokes through his cigar smoke, and Fanny Brice sang about her man. In its heyday, there was no other place to be. All of it gone now—the park, the coaster, the pavilion—except the pianos beneath the lake’s water, where all that remains from this time rests.

Before the lake, many of these pianos were separated from their joists through hammer, through the only means of destruction acceptable for such an instrument, and burned. This took time, man-power—it came at a cost for the enterprising Hevig brothers, who’s building on Wealthy Street could no longer bear the weight of all the pianos they had in storage, removed from the parlors of homes around East Grand Rapids. So the lake it was.

The brothers lugged the pianos to the shore at night, loaded them on a flat boat, paddled out to the deep part of the lake and heaved them overboard. Under the guise of moonlight, the brothers made many trips, buried many pianos. In the winter, in the bitter wind and cold of a Lake Michigan winter, they would slide the pianos with a two-track sled to the middle were a hole carved in the ice waited. They did this until all the pianos were gone, their building empty. The Hevig brothers did the heavy lifting, but the radio was the one that sealed the piano’s fate. The radio, before video killed it, did its own slaying.

These pianos are memorialized today with miniature bronze statues that surround the fountain in the center of the Gaslight Village, just down the street from the lake, where the real pianos rest. Half sunk in the pavement, these tiny statues pay tribute to all that remains at the bottom of Reeds Lake.

Consider this when you listen to the sound the waves make.