All I wanted was a piano. I did not seek a reality check or a meaningful moment or a story to tell in these pages.
I just wanted a lousy piano, that’s all.
My editor had said: You need a break, take a day off from Katrina; go do something to forget.
He recommended gardening—digging dirt and pulling weeds—for that’s what had cleared his head of the malaise that had stalked him the weekend before.
Indeed, my yard desperately needs attendance. But I’m not as interested in yard work as I used to be, or golf or cooking, and I realize that losing interest in your hobbies is a bad sign, but I reasoned that replacing old hobbies with new hobbies would be a sure way to end-run the case of the mean reds that hunts me.
Fool the mind to save the body.
Several weeks ago, I sat down at a piano at a friend’s house with a resolve to learn it and within an hour realized that I had found a new salve.
I was terrible, of course, but the ease with which I coaxed out a few simple melodies delighted me. A natural? Far from it. But, like Stella, I just want to get my groove back. A piano, I thought, would help.
I had no idea where to get one. I wanted something simple and compact. A modest electric model would do.
In the yellow pages I came upon the Bitsie Werlein Piano Company in Metairie.
Surely you know the name. The Werlein family opened their first music store in New Orleans in the mid–nineteenth century, and there has been a store operating under their name—first on Canal Street and then on Veterans Memorial Boulevard—ever since, with only one interruption for the Civil War.
When the family closed the Vets flagship store three years ago, Bitsie started her smaller operation around the corner on Severn Avenue.
I guess I am still sometimes fairly naive about the scope and distance of the flooding that occurred in Jefferson Parish—and in other places, actually. It seems that you can drive and drive and drive in all directions and never find the end of it.
But I didn’t realize until I pulled into the parking lot of the somewhat nondescript shopping center that housed Bitsie Werlein’s shop on Severn that her pianos had marinated for weeks in Katrina Stew.
The store was vacant and closed.
I stood there looking through a storefront window at empty space. First it took the Civil War. Then, 140 years later, it took a fierce wind coupled with government incompetence to shut Werlein down. Cue Joan Baez: “The night they drove ol’ Dixie down . . .”
I tracked Bitsie Werlein down. I wanted to know what had become of her. I apologized for bothering her at home.
“That’s all right,” she said. “My customers, they find me. Even when I was evacuated, they managed to find me. You know, when most of my customers leave my store,” she added, apropos of nothing, “they usually kiss me good-bye. That’s the way the piano business is.”
She said her longtime staff is scattered to the wind but she will open—alone—sometime, some place, down the road.
“We were like family, but things aren’t the same anymore,” she said. “It’s been a long haul, but I am finding my way anew. I will be re-established.”
When? Who knows? Where? Who knows? Like everything else around here, it’s a work in progress.
I hung up the phone. Stared into windows. I came for a piano and instead got a sad song. So I went back to the phone book, where I found the Hall Piano Company on David Drive.
The Hall Piano Company was not affected by the wind or the water. I just wanted to get inside the air-conditioned showroom and bend my head over some keyboards and forget, to lose myself into music and otherness.
I was in the digital piano studio in the back when another customer pointed out to the salesman, “That’s the one! It was just like that. That’s the one she used to have.”
Good God, it’s following me, I thought.
I looked at the customer, the man. He wore the vacant and pained expression of the tribe we all belong to—the Elders of Loss. This guy was here, in a piano store, trying to put back the pieces of his family’s life, and one of those pieces was a piano.
And then I realized, or wondered, actually: How many pianos? How many were destroyed? Thousands upon thousands, I suppose.
Like everything else.
Watching the dynamic of the Hall Piano Company, I suddenly realized you can drive around enough to get away from the brown waterline but you can’t escape the storm no matter where you go. Welcome to the Hotel California.
Here, inside this pristine showroom, a bunch of guys in shirts and ties who simply used to sell pianos now have a new job description: grief counselors.
“Everyone who walks in here has the same story, but it’s a different story—if you know what I mean,” sales manager John Wright told me. “I mean, there’s always a twist to it.”
It starts with the piano, of course. It was the grandmother’s, back in that old house she had in Gentilly, and then she moved to Chalmette, gosh, back in the ’60s, and then she died, and, well . . . it was in our house in Lakeview when, you know . . . when it all happened . . .
Then come the stories of everything that happened around that piano for the past fifty years, and wrapped inside the small story of a piano are the larger stories of lost homes and scattered families and dreams torn down and everything just . . . sorrow.
Watching folks buy pianos at Hall’s, you’d think they were selecting a casket in a funeral home, so filled with grief and remembrance they are.
“Pianos are like members of the family,” Wright says. “They’ve been part of the family forever, a centerpiece of their lives. Even if it just sits over in the corner against the wall, it’s always been there, usually longer than any other piece of furniture in the house.”
So the guys at Hall Piano listen to the stories, as all of us—postmen, pharmacists, waitresses, barbers, UPS guys, meter readers, coffee shop clerks, real estate agents, reporters—listen to the stories. That’s all of our jobs now, because all anyone really wants—all anyone really needs around here—is to have someone listen to their stories.
The same story, but different.
“People really get attached to their pianos,” Wright says. “I’m willing to guess that when someone walks into Best Buy to replace the fifty-four-inch plasma TV they lost in the flood, they don’t pull out pictures of their old TV to show to the salesman. We get that all the time.”
Me, I just wanted a piano. And so I got it and, obviously, much, much more. It’s a Yamaha P-140. It’s nice. Nothing fancy.
At night, I stare at the keys, try to look inside the machine, to see if I can find a song, a melody, even just a slight phrasing that’s not about all this. I sit at my new piano and try to remember how to tell a story about something else.
And nothing comes. Not a single note.