Let’s take a look at the numbers:
1: Phone call from a woman at the Lummi Island church asking if I’d like to have their baby grand piano for its mahogany wood. Nobody wants old pianos as they are expensive to maintain and take up too much space. She knew I’m harvesting solid wood from old furniture purchased at the recent church rummage sale. Plus, no one at the church wanted to move a baby grand piano down the stairs. Church folks are smart.
1910: The year the piano was built. Workers in the Emerson Piano Company in Boston signed and dated the parts they created. Craftsmen writing in beautiful penmanship that isn’t seen anymore.
11: Hours needed to take the piano apart. A lot of the time spent gawking over the ingenuity and intricacy of the instrument’s mechanisms. Admired those signatures, too.
400: Just a guess as to the weight of the piano’s massive, cast iron harp that holds hundreds of strings. Good thing my pal, Bob, wanted to help. Bob and I are alike–not as smart as church folks who’ve figured out they don’t wanna move a baby grand piano down the stairs.
60: Minutes required to cut apart the piano harp with my Sawzall. It still took both Bob and I to carry the large chunks of the cast iron out of the church.
2: Big plastic jars of screws that were removed from the Emerson.
100+: Wooden parts that’ll be repurposed into other projects.
16: Dollars it cost to dispose of unusable piano parts at the dump.
7: More hours to take piano pieces apart and remove the wood’s finish in the woodshop.
7/12: The patent date of the piano in 1887. The same month and day as my birthday. That date is stamped into a piece of wood that also holds piano hammers. It’s now woodshop wall art.
125: The Cessna’s miles per hour as we flew over the San Juan Islands a couple days ago. The flight was a birthday gift from Karin. Have always wanted to see our house and all the Islands from the sky.
172: Islands and reefs in the San Juan Islands.
31: Straight line miles from Lummi Island to Vancouver Island—which we can see from our house.
50: Straight line kilometers from Lummi Island to Vancouver Island. (We know a lot of Canadians so wanna make sure they feel welcome by doing the distance conversion.)
10: We just entered our 10th year of retirement.
1: One day of rest is what I want to recover from all this retirement.
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Piano innards are now woodshop wall art. All I can hear is ‘Happy Birthday.’
The Kelley World Tour 