Dateline: Healdsburg (CA) dump: My daughter’s old upright freezer died
and I was charged with getting rid of the thing. With a little research, I find that Sonoma County landfills
will recycle old major appliances charging twenty bucks per item if the unit
has Freon in it. All others are
free.
So I truck it on over to the
landfill. The host waves me
through without weighing my vehicle, telling me to see the fellows over in
recycle. “Take a left at the top
of the hill.”
Recycle is a rich milieu of
using building materials, windows, doors, toilets and such along with glass,
aluminum and cardboard. Not
immediately seeing appliances in the mix, I pull in looking for someone
official willing to take my twenty and give me some direction.
I don’t see anybody. What I do see, however, amid barbecues and dressers and old couches, is a
derelict spinet piano, some off brand, standing abandoned and alone, like Bogey
at that train station in Paris. (My brother, who moves pianos for a living, says
more and more frequently he is taking them to the dump because they are too old
to tune and there is no market for them.)
Since everything in life relates in one way or another to a scene from Casablanca, I walk over to the
instrument and begin to tickle out a few bars of “As Time Goes By.”
Another customer comes up to me,
thinking I must work at the place and asks me where he should drop off his old
RCA Victor TV. “I don’t know,” I
respond, “I was going to ask you where to put my freezer.” I turn back to the keyboard and pick up
where I’d left off: Moonlight and love songs…
This incident got me
thinking. What if, on Saturdays,
someone pulled a six-hour shift – say, ten to four – at the dump attending to an
old junker piano. He or she could
play standards and take requests, perhaps placing a big glass brandy snifter on
top of the thing for tips.
Thirty years ago, my old buddy
Tom and I used to trek out to the Jamestown landfill with our household garbage
about once a month. We’d look at
what folks had discarded and comment on what a cultural experience it was.
A piano man would only make a
trip to the dump more so.
Where are you Billy Joel?
© 2015
Church of the Open Road Press
No comments:
Post a Comment