|
Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
March 23, 2014
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2014 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
|
|
Salt-Streaked Subaru, 2014
© 2014 by Bud Grossmann
|
ONE THING LEADS TO A BROTHER
Friday, March 21, 2014
11:00PM
I’m a fan of the Coen Brothers. A few nights ago, Celeste and I watched Inside Llewyn Davis on a Netflix disk, and I gave it six stars out of five. We then took the movie out to Dad, at the farm. He watched it alone and didn’t much care for it. When Dad returned the disk to me, I invited Celeste to watch the film a second time. She was willing, and I gave it six stars again. Then I asked if she will watch once more, so I can tally all the instances where anyone mentions David Fisher. I was kidding, but there are, as you may know, many such instances.
Now this has nothing to do with Inside Llewyn Davis, but tonight, after the movie was over, I decided to count the keys on Celeste’s long-dormant Wurlitzer upright piano. What prompted this trivial project was my recalling the birthday card Celeste made and gave to Dad two Sundays ago, on his 88th birthday. On the face of the card she put a color photograph she had taken of a large, young woman earnestly scowling into the sheet music above the keyboard of a grand piano. Celeste and I joked that we might put a caption under the photo, in a florid font, “It’s not over till ...”
I mean, that is exactly how we proposed to print it. With the quotation marks, with the three dots. “It’s not over till ...”
Prudently, Celeste instead printed “Happy Birthday, David, Sr.!” beneath the grand piano picture, and after she wrote out her good wishes inside the card, she added, “Did you know there are eighty-eight keys in the keyboard of a grand piano?”
I began to wonder whether an upright might have as many keys as a grand. A grand looks so much grander. Well, tonight I checked. I began by laying a sheet of typing paper along the keys to measure off a block of them, but as I moved the paper along, I found I couldn’t do the necessary multiplication, so I stopped and started over and counted the white keys one-by-one, left-to-right, and made a U-turn at the end to add in the black keys, right-to-left, five plus five plus five, all the way to the far left end of the scale, and, yes, the number was the same as my father’s age.
When the key count was complete, I checked the tuning of this lovely Wurlitzer by playing The Irish Washerwoman, and then Jingle Bells, with my right hand. Many of the notes sounded perfect. I waited for my audience to demand an encore. A couple of hours have passed, and I am still waiting. If the request comes in, I’ll play those same two songs again, as they are the only ones I know.
You would probably enjoy seeing Celeste’s portrait of the plump pianist, but, I’m sorry, I cannot show it to you. How about if I show you a picture, though, of a pleasant plump person preparing to wash a salt-streaked Subaru on the first day of spring in a little Wisconsin town? The picture has nothing to do with Coen Brothers movies or with pianos great or small, but don’t you think it’s better than nothing?
♦
|
I would welcome your thoughts on this page (or any of my
others). Write to me at the following address. Please
be sure to spell Grossmann with two n’s and
mention what page you are writing about.
Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
|
Top of this page
|
|
