When I met Dan, he told me to tuck in my shirt. Look sharp. For the purposes of my story I’d asked to help him move pianos around St. Petersburg. He agreed, but he didn’t want his customers thinking he’d hired some schlep to help.
If I looked like a schlep, it was because I’d been waiting for him to show up for about 30 minutes, pacing the parking lot as I looked for his truck. When he finally arrived, he handed me his card. Dan the Piano Man, it read. And beneath his name: Piano Movers Who Care, with a list of piano-oriented jobs – tuning, renting and playing.
As we pulled away, I saw a single rain cloud, one of the sky-swallowing beasts native to Florida. The kind that turn a normal afternoon into a biblical disaster.
When it began to pour, Dan and I were rolling a 600-pound upright piano into the flatbed of his truck.
Any approximation of neatness had gone out the window at this point. My hair stuck to my forehead. My glasses were spotted with rain drops. My notebook flapped from my back pocket, its pages soaked.
How I ended up there, standing in the flatbed of an idling truck with a 60-year-old piano mover yelling orders at me as his customers, a young married couple, watched from the safety of their home – I don’t know.
I’m trying to figure that out.
I wasn’t the stereotypical kid-journalist who blurted out questions at the dinner table, who constantly raised his hand in class, who accosted complete strangers in the grocery store. I was curious, like most children, only I didn’t ask many questions.
For instance:
When I was 5, my mother told me I’d be a preacher. She was sitting in the kitchen; I’d just walked in from my bedroom. She said it with a casual certainty, and with no precipitation that I can remember. Its suddenness made it all the more prophetic. Part of me believed her, wanted to know how she could know such a thing. The other half of me knew she was wrong.
And she was.
First of all, we didn’t go to church. And like a lot of kids, I wanted to draw, to make cartoons.
She knew that.
I remember this moment from my childhood whenever I consider what I eventually chose to do – journalism. Just after high school, my sister helped me get a job writing obituaries. I told people’s stories. In short declarative sentences, I described how a person got from Point A (birth), to Point B (death).
Sometimes those stories weren’t interesting. Other times they were.
Which brings me back to Dan.
At his shop, where he sells pianos, he explained to me that people identify themselves through the work they do. In Dan’s case, he used to be a clown, then a cop. He was forced to resign after he fell asleep during a midnight patrol. He’d also gotten his car stuck in sand and, on another occasion, ran out of gas.
After he resigned, he worked a score of other jobs. Identities. He drove taxis, managed a McDonald’s. He collected urine samples as a probation officer’s aide. But through everything, all the ups and downs, he played music.
It was his Point A to Point B.
He says his job is boring. But take away pianos, and I know he’d be just as crushed as he was when he resigned from the police force. It was the silver lining he always missed, and the one he eventually found. It just took him 30 years – half his life – to find it.
Here’s what I’m trying to say:
If people identify themselves through their work, then Dan’s life, his Point A to Point B, has been a process of elimination. A series of trials and errors. And for me to tell his story is to live vicariously through his eyes, to try on all the hats he’s worn, one by one, until I’m just as happy to sit at a piano as he is.
For me to help him move pianos is to stand in his place for a moment, to better understand him.
After sitting down to piece together his story from a batch of rain-damaged notebooks, I’m reminded that writing about someone else’s life reveals part of your own. You’re telling it in your voice. You’re limited to your vocabulary, to your experiences. But in the end, if you’ve done it right, you own that story almost as much as the person who actually lived it.
It’s a familiar feeling, one I used to get in small doses as I memorialized a person in a 10- or 12-inch obituary. As I set someone else’s life down in words, my own story comes into sharp focus. I can see myself through the eyes of a 60-year-old piano mover. I can see myself drenched, shirt untucked, wiping the water from my glasses.
That’s what I was doing in the flatbed of that truck, taking orders from a man I’d known for only half an hour.
Journalism is my retribution for not asking questions as a kid.
It’s my Point A to Point B.
I’m just thankful it didn’t take 30 years to find.
