Beginner Gardening: Dumb and Dumberest! Share your stupidest garden endeavor., 1 by JaxFlaGardener

JaxFlaGardener wrote:
Hilarious stories, Rachel and NCGarden!! Rachel, I think your kidnapping story falls into the category of "no good deed goes unpunished." LOL

Here's another of my exploits. It is long and written as usual in my overly verbose style. Please don't let my lenghthy sagas intimidate you from making more posts in this thread. I've gotten good, hearty laughs each morning from your stories and hope you will keep them coming!

________

I was headed to the grocery store one day when I spotted a small cluster of people standing on a street corner looking down at the ground. I thought maybe an animal or a person had been hit by a car, so I slowed down. As I got closer, I realized the group was eyeing a dead piano.

I had to stop and find what story was behind this event. The group reported they had watched a small pick-up truck, loaded with an old 1800's antique piano in the open truck bed, turn the corner. The driver had apparently not tied the piano down in any manner (maybe he/she is watching this thread and can tell their own dumb story - LOL). When the truck had turned the street corner at too high a speed, the piano flipped out of the back of the truck and smashed into splinters on the street curb. Just a few moments prior to my arrival, the driver had stormed away from the scene in disgust at having destroyed the piano.

Already, the street scavenger vultures were descending upon the piano, removing anything that looked like it might have some ornamental or utilitarian purpose. The two old finials of the keyboard support went quickly as did the authentic ivory keys. A friend of mine has the inner hammer works of an old upright piano as an object d' arte/sculpture in his house. He uses it at holiday time to display greeting cards by sticking the cards between the piano hammers. I much envied his piano hammer card rack and had wanted one for myself. Here was an opportunity for me made available by someone else's misfortune.

I went on with my shopping, but returned a while later, armed with screwdrivers and other implements. I was able to get the piano hammer mechanism out without much problem (and I still have it, moving it around from one place to another in the garage about once a month or so -- it still hasn't found a display place in my house). After removing the felt hammers intact, I noticed the beautiful, ornate steel harp that held all the strings in place. "What a wonderful garden sculpture that would make!" I thought, and began my attempt to remove the huge screws. Some of the screws had a head on them about 1 inch in diameter and were about 4 inches long, so it took a lot of wrist action with the screwdriver to loosen them. Also, most of them had rusted to the steel frame due to ever present sub-tropical humidity over the course of a couple of hundred years. I couldn't get some of the screws to even slightly budge and some where underneath the strings and very difficult to get at with a screwdriver. I resolved to return the next day and continue my efforts.

I returned not only the next day, but every spare minute for about the next 10 days!

After about the 3rd day, removing the steel harp from the wooden frame became an obsession rather than just a whim. I felt like I had to have the steel harp or my life would never be complete again. I tried all sorts of ways to get the screws to come loose. I invented a "torque screwdriver" by combining an arrangement of a long pvc pipe with a pvc elbow on the end and the handle of a broken off segment of a flat-headed screwdriver crazy-glued into the open end of the pvc elbow with a short section of rebar steel inside the long pvc section for added strength. The additional leverage was not enough to make some of the screws pop loose from their centuries old corrosion, even after they were given a thorough soaking with WD-40.

I decided what I needed was an axe to chop away the wood so I could release the metal from the piano frame, but I didn't have an axe and was living in a rental home at that time and didn't see the need to invest in an axe. My Mom was in the hospital for a temporary illness. I left my work with the dead piano long enough to go visit her. As I was leaving the hospital that night, upon arrival at my parking place on the street, I was amazed to find an object lying directly alongside the passenger side of my car. IT WAS AN AXE! A very large axe with a long fiberglass handle. This is the most poignant experience of "ask and you shall receive" that I have ever manifested. The axe had some red and yellow tape around the handle and it looked as though it might have fallen off a fire truck, but there was no identifying marks that might allow me to return it to the fire station or other owner. I was certain that the next person that would park in that spot would surely be a wanna-be axe murder whom had been heretofore prevented from a killing spree only from the lack of a suitable sharp implement, so, in the best interest of public safety, I took the axe home with me.

My request for an axe being answered so promptly and eloquently, it now seemed like "God's Will" that I have the steel harp from the piano. I returned to the street corner the next day and began to hack away at the piano with religious zeal. By this time, the neighbors had begun to watch the madman, often cursing and yelling and waving the axe in frustration, as I returned every few hours to the scene of the piano's demise. Each whack of the axe on the wood sent a reverberating discordant loud crashing piano noise throughout the surrounding quiet neighborhood, much like what you might hear from untutored toddlers banging on a piano. A few people, mostly the retirees who had long ago realized that life was not worth living without some risk, were brave enough to venture out and talk to me to try to find out what in the world I was doing.

One of them was particularly memorable. A 70+ year old, white haired man that had dropped his wife off at the beauty parlor and found time to escape for some adventure. My shenanigans with the dead piano was the closest thing he could find for a little excitement. We talked at some length. With the dismembered, but not yet disemboweled, piano at our feet, the subject of music naturally arose. In his youth, the man had been a guitar player in a band. He had traveled all around the Southeastern states to various honky-tonks and other venues. He had encountered a minor brush with fame when his group got to play for a famous country singer of the day. He wistfully recounted his wild adventures as I continued to attempt to crank out the stubborn screws in the piano. I could imagine him in his younger day, probably in oiled back jet black hair, cowboy hat rakishly tilted, carousing and singing and romancing the ladies. Now he stood above me, swaying with a bit of instability on his cane. I could see myself in him in a few more decades, the wild times long behind me, settled into the slow decline to death. I commented on a screw that I was trying without success to loosen, "No matter the job, there's always one screw that won't budge," I said. "Yes," he agreed, "there's always one screw." We observed a profound moment of silence in awe of this inescapable truism of Murphy's Law. Other people that dropped by also felt compelled to share some segment of their life story as they gathered up bits and pieces of the piano and told me their own imaginative intentions for the scrap they were taking. I began to feel a sense of territorial possessiveness about the piano, like a lion protecting its kill from the jackals, but I managed to keep my greed in check, and did not roar obscenities nor chase away anyone that wanted some plank of wood or other tidbit from what remained of the dead piano.

As I neared the end of the 10 days of nearly constant work at trying to salvage the metal harp from the piano, I became concerned that the city garbage service might finally be motivated to come remove the piano. By this time, all other parts of the piano had been picked clean by curious or insane persons like myself. Government officials had visited the site at least once but, probably finding the approx. 800 lbs of the piano carcass too heavy for even a team of workers to lift without risk of back injury, and likely making a bureaucratic determination that "piano moving" was not listed in their job description, they had just placed some orange traffic cones around the one edge of the piano that jutted out past the curb. I didn't want all my hours and hours of effort to go to waste by letting the garbage truck haul away this priceless find. If I had returned at some point and found the last remains of the dead piano missing, I would have been totally distraught.

Aha! An idea came to me! There was no need to leave the piano on the street corner. I could put it in my truck and haul it home and finish removing the harp at leisure (if you can call slaving away at a seemingly impossible goal "leisure"). Having been provided with an axe upon request, I figured divine powers might once again smile upon me and provide me the super-human strength needed to lift the piano. I confidently backed my pick-up truck to the curb where the piano lay and I dropped the tail gate.

My first thought for moving the massive steel frame, still encased defiantly in heavy wood, was levitation, but no amount of chanting "Om!" would make the piano rise and float into my truck bed. Beginning to doubt that divine intervention would assist, I then decided I could move the frame in a zig-zag manner one corner at a time, inching it with great difficulty across the grass where it lay near the curb. I finally succeeded in pushing the entire frame off the curb. It hit the street with a loud resonant chord greatly resembling the one heard at the end of one of the Beatle's favorite hits, after the "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" era but prior to their Ravi Shankar sitar period.

After hacking away at the wood over the course of several days, I thought the frame would now be light enough to lift. I carefully bent my knees, following all the guidelines for lifting heavy objects, took hold of the piano frame at a couple of points where I could manage to get my fingers underneath it, and gave it a good UMPH! Using all my strength gained by years of gym workouts, minus the atrophy of muscles brought on by advancing years, and summoning up all my adrenalin, I did manage to lift one corner of the piano frame and drop it precariously onto the edge of my truck tailgate. The tailgate audibly strained under the weight and I thought it might snap off as the rear end of the truck sank down such that the back tires were just about resting on the wheel wells. I could find no angle of attack nor method of leverage that would push the piano any further up into the truck bed.

Since it was unlikely that Paul Bunyun would saunter by and help with the lifting, I had to come up with yet another plan, especially now that the piano frame and my truck were totally out into the street and blocking the corner.

In desperation, Lo!, another idea came to me. I could just drag the piano home behind my truck without having to lift it! I pulled the truck forward and allowed the piano to drop off the much relieved tailgate. The piano slammed to the ground with an accompanying thunderous vibrato. I placed the orange cones around the piano frame and rushed off to a nearby Home Depot, where I purchased a long nylon towing strap. Arriving back at the scene of the piano's demise, I knotted the towing strap to the rear frame of my Tacoma truck body and securely tied the other end to the piano frame. "Piece of cake," I congratulated myself.

I pulled away from the curb very slowly, the piano in tow. I had already mapped out in my head (yes, I am sometimes cabable of rational thought!) a route through the back streets that I could take to get the piano the one mile to my house with the least traffic or other annoyances. As I reached sufficient speed to drag the piano comfortably, it began to play its farewell symphony as it bounced and scraped along the pavement, a John Cage-like cacophonus, unmelodic strumming of dischords, loud enough for all around to hear. The piano did not obey my wishes and follow in a straight path directly behind my truck. Instead, it chose to swing from side to side, crashing from curb to curb with tympanic accents to its dynamic performance. I wished that I had a recording device fastened to the back of my truck to document this once in a lifetime musical treat, which I named appropriately, "Sonata with Dragged Piano." But I was not alone in my enjoyment of the improvisational score. As I moved through the community, I noticed people were called to their front doors by the sound of the piano. They stuck their heads out briefly to determine what might be the source of this odd commotion. Some stood gaped mouth, staring in disbelief at the sight of the dilapidated piano being dragged down their street in seeming punishment like a loathsome horse thief in an old Western movie. It is my supposition that, for some of them, it may have been one of the most interesting events in their lives. I imagine that they went back into their living rooms and, over the sound of the blaring re-runs of the Jerry Springer Show, got into heated arguments as to what they had just witnessed and opined their far-reaching best guesses as to why anyone would pull a piano behind a pick-up truck. I see them still today, at holiday time and family reunions, savoring the memory, "Remember that time that guy was pulling a piano on a tow rope....," and recounting the tale of the dragged piano to their children and grandchildren as folklore woven into the essential fabric of their lives.

Arriving at my house, luckily without citation nor other mishap, I pulled the piano up onto my paved driveway, unfastened it, and then drove my truck across the lawn to the curb, the driveway now being inaccessible for ingress or egress while the piano lay in state. I was ecstatic! I had conquered the dead piano!!

Within a few days, my landlord began to receive complaints from the people in surrounding houses, annoyed by what they perceived to be the eyesore of a piano skeleton in clear view near the street in the driveway. Skeptical disdain is a problem I often encounter with the unimaginative commonperson, those that can't look past temporary destruction and disorder to see potential beauty. At my landlord's continued insistence, and again with all my available strength, I managed to stand the piano upright and get a dolly underneath its edge. I wheeled it to a more inconspicuous place and left it standing in the carport.

I never got around to finishing the job of removing the wood from the metal piano harp. In the time the piano lay on the street corner and in my driveway, the frequent Florida rains had caused the wood to begin to swell and the glue to lose its effectiveness. Chunks of the wood began to fall away without any effort on my part. I was content to let Nature take its inevitable course and eventually rot away all the wood. And besides, now that the piano was no longer a challenge, I became quickly bored with it.

I bought my current house within a few months after I acquired the piano. With the help of a couple of hefty Lesbian friends and their 30 foot long flatbed trailer (something every Lesbian should have for their frequent decisions for cohabitation after the second date), I was able to move the remains of the piano to its new home along with all my other most valuable possessions. I have made the decision that this was my final move - I'm in this house until death do us part. With 1/2 acre to subject to my overly enthusiastic gardening efforts and plenty of other projects for home remodeling and enhancements, I have all that I need in this location to be completely content.

And now, the dead piano stands as "garden art," but to me seems to be more of trophy, my own version of a taxidermed rhinocerous head, reminding me that I can achieve most anything so long as I'm willing to devote the time, energy, and mental and physical resources needed to get the job done, and if I am willing to take a chance on being committed to an asylum for my methods of achieving my goals.

Little did I know (until the fact was pointed out by a musician friend) that it is the wood in a piano that creates the sound and not the strings, so the piano is now almost completely mute. Now that most of the remainder of the wood has rotted away from the effects of the sub-tropical elements of heat, humidity, and a host of wood eating insects, molds, and bacteria, there is no sounding board for reverberation. I thus had to let go of my scheme of turning the piano infrastructure into a giant hanging wind chime.

I have since found another piano frame on another street corner! It would seem that I'm karmically destined to give due respect to piano corpses in need of a final resting place. The second piano was small enough to lift more easily, could fit inside the truck bed, and didn't involve the debacle of getting it home as was needed for its larger cousin. They both stand together in a corner of my yard. Someday I plan to take them one step further and erect them on their apex, imbedded firmly in a concrete stand, and possibly paint their strings with vibrant colors so that they more closely resemble the "iron butterflies" that I can see in their shapes. For the time being, they are very tentatively upright, standing only by counterbalancing each other's weight, with some Passiflores vines beginning to weave between them and grasp hold of the broken strings. When visitors to my garden ask (and they always do!) what the strange metal shapes are, I comment offhandedly, without detail, "Oh, just some old piano harps I found on the street," unwilling to share the full depth of my intense insanity except with a few trusted fellow gardeners, like yourselves.

(Attached is Dogzilla's photo of my "piano garden art" (taken when she was at the DG Roundup at my place back in May)



(Edits for spelling and grammar and some additional paragraphs added)
This message was edited Aug 2, 2005 3:59 PM
This message was edited Aug 2, 2005 8:00 PM

This message was edited Aug 3, 2005 9:45 AM

This message was edited Aug 5, 2005 11:06 AM