Part 2: First Encounter

Part II : First Encounter

I got my VW van ready to haul a sizeable instrument and headed out one morning. I got there and sure enough, a 1960s Baldwin Combo Harpsichord sat in the basement living room holding up a few pictures and a plastic plant on a lace doilie.

This experience was painful to me, so I'll recount it quickly. When I talked to the seller on the phone she jokingly said, "I just keep the thing around to let my grandkids pound on it."

I chuckled then. I didn't chuckle when I saw the 4-year-old boy pounding the keyboard. He was doing just what a 4-year-old boy always does, trying to break everything in sight, including the harpsichord.

I spent an hour inspecting the keyboard and all the while the boy was literally pounding on the keys, the plexiglas cover, kicking the legs, jumping on the crummy Fender Squire amp the harpsichord was plugged into. I was really going crazy watching it.

Eventually I deemed the instrument (which I really knew nothing about) to be savable. All the plectrum were miraculously intact, as were the steel strings. The only thing missing is the stereo volume pedal you see in a few of the half-dozen pictures of this instrument scattered around the web.

The seller assumed the instrument was broken because only half the switches worked on the preamp. But she had it going into a mono guitar amp so I figured it probably worked just fine.

She told me she got it from a married, closeted gay man; an orchestra teacher in Texas. "He hid it so well," she told me, "hardly anyone really knew!" She told him once in passing that she loved the 'harps a cord'. Several years later he died and willed it to her, along with a knitting machine.

She brought it out west in a move and along the way the wax holding the pickups melted from the intense heat of the moving van. Wax dripped all over the bright red soundboard, covering and silencing many of the strings.

Finally I asked the seller, "well, do you care if I take it away then?"

As her grandson alternated between clobbering the keys and kicking the amp she asked him, "will you be sad if you don't have the piano?"

"Yes! I'll be sad!"

She was excited by this and asked him, "if we get you lessons will you learn it?"

"Yes! I want to learn it!"

She turned to me and said, "Sorry. I've changed my mind. We're going to keep it. We'll consider a trade for a pool table if you have anything like that."

I sort of snapped and grabbed the kid's hands as he pounded on the keyboard and ordered him to stop. I told the owner that if even one of those plectrum broke the keyboard would be nearly worthless. I explained that the parts on harpsichord are rare and probably nearly impossible to find. They disagreed and I decided to just let it go, chalk it up to bad luck and wasted gas and just drive home.

She told me she'd take my name and phone number and if she didn't get any offers in the next month she think about dropping it off at my place. Okay, whatever.

I wrote my information on an envelope and she taped it to the keyboard before putting doilies and plastic plant on top of it.

For the record the woman and her husband selling the keyboard were extremely nice. I don't think she had really thought through the idea of getting rid of the harpsichord before I arrived. That's what spurred the last minute change of heart.

As I left it there I was trying to block out the sounds of the old instrument being beat to death when the seller said, "I'm thinking of painting it white..."

Sigh...