The first real house my wife and I lived in was a dilapidated ranch in a nice neighborhood. It didn’t look so bad on the outside but the inside hadn’t been taken care of since the day it was constructed. We were renters so we didn’t have much say in the matter. The kitchen appliances were from the ’50s, the bathrooms were terrifying, and you could see directly into the crawl space from the warped flooring. But, we had lived in apartments for the previous decade and now we had a yard. Our dogs could run freely. We could plant flowers. I could grill.
Now that we had all this new space we had the opportunity to fill it with useless junk. One afternoon I found myself at an estate sale sourcing junk with my wife. Estate sales mean 1 of 3 things. Someone died. Someone got foreclosed. Or someone was too lazy to pack and wanted to sell all of their stuff. From the condition of this particular estate sale, I guessed the reason was of the morbid nature.
As we went room by room inspecting the chipped china and half-used bottles of mouth wash we made it to the damp basement of this ‘estate’. Everything in this room was marked ‘free’. Everything. Even a large upright piano in the corner of the room. My wife had always wanted a piano and I knew the minute she saw it we were going to get it one way or another. This wasn’t the typical home version of an upright piano. This was a monster of a machine. The type you would find in an old church Sunday school room or the storage room of a funeral parlor. I inquired with the salespeople. “What’s the catch?” Pianos are not cheap. The catch was that it was free, but I had to move it out myself, which would be no small feat. The only way out was through a narrow back door and up two flights of rapidly crumbling, concrete stairs. Impossible.
It was then I learned that there is a cottage industry of people that hang around these types of sales and wait for buffoons like me to come along. A man approached us and said he had a truck and he and his son would help me move the piano to my house for a nominal fee. Next thing I know I am helping these guys push this piano out of the house which we soon realized its innards were comprised of solid iron. It took us about an hour but finally, we made it to the summit and used the last bit of our strength to push this thing up the ramp and onto the world’s smallest pickup truck.
Our house was only a few miles away so the guys in the truck followed us there. We went very slow because the piano was upright and if it were to fall over on its side, who knew what would happen. Well, we took a turn onto our street, and over it went leaning on the side of the truck. It was so heavy on the one side that it popped the back tire and the truck arrived with sparks shooting off the rim. I didn’t feel bad for these opportunists. The amount I paid them would cover a tire. The way I looked at it I got to pay for a free piano and they got to move a paid piano for free.
Once this massive, out of tune, box of metal was put in the house we realized how much it costs to get a piano professionally tuned, and there it sat to collect dust. We also realized the next morning that something had eaten some food on our counter. And as time went on we realized that a lot of things were getting destroyed. Come to find out we had a serious rodent problem that never existed before this piano entered our doors. And it got worse and worse and worse, as did the other problems with the house. Finally we we had no choice but to find a new domicile.
There are multiple explanations for the rodent invasion. At the time we lived in this neighborhood all of the houses were being bought up, demolished, and rebuilt into larger ones. The construction companies were moving so quickly that they would bulldoze houses that still had furniture and possessions in them. That kind of activity can send all kinds of creatures moving about. Or, the rodents could have been in the house all along and we never noticed. Not likely. I choose to believe that they hid in the piano and came out in the middle of the night like the Greeks in Troy.
When we abandoned the house we left most of our furniture there since it was now sullied. We also left the piano. We drove by the old neighborhood a few years ago and there is now a multimillion dollar mansion sitting where the hovel once stood. Demolition and gentrification is the ultimate fate for any house in Atlanta over 5 years old. I wasn’t there when the house was taken down but I can only imagine the string of expletives that came out of the bulldozer operator’s mouth when he hit that solid metal piano. I have to wonder if they removed it or if it was too heavy and they just buried it on site. If so it’s only a matter of time before the Greeks invade again.