How to move a piano

It’s not about the piano. B, who is decommissioning her life, is getting ready to transition, she is giving away everything. She goes through closets to get rid of old towels. She tells me stories of the blankets. The one her mother slept under for decades, cream white in the sun. It will go to one of her daughters along with the Seminole spread and ruana. She airs them out in the weak winter sun. She is making things ready for the next incarnation. She says don’t use the word death. Use use the word reincarnated. I am going to be reincarnated soon. B is 85. She is telling me where to put things, what to move, what goes to hospice. I am bearing witness. She tells me the grand piano needs to be moved to the San Geronimo Valley Golf Course. No matter that it is closed for good. She tells me this several times. So this is important. She is concerned about re-homing her things. She organizes her art pieces, broadsides in the vein of Kenneth Patchen, into threes, she wants her art to be collated and put up on the internet for others to see. She is also making up art packets as gifts for people—copies of her work. But she has written things down in an obscure language. She says her job on this earth was to translate this global language. Perhaps it’s phonetic, perhaps she has forgotten how to spell. Her mind wanders. I ask her to leave us a cypher, or a key so that we can translate her poems. It’s all about taking care of the reader, I tell her. She resists, but in the resisting, the penny drops. As she deciphers her secret language, she laughs, oh ho! and relives the delight of creating those riddles. She understands what I am asking her to do, in that her work will survive her. She calls it the galactic language. She tells me again and again that they are coming soon. That we don’t have to worry about anything. But I am ever the doubting Thomas, the meat and potato thinker, not the mercurial one. This woman I have known since I was ten is always listening to that silent inner music. Because my mother was also mercurial, I learned to be stubbornly stoic. What B is doing is writing things phonetically, it’s fascinating in that she has to read them aloud in order to learn what she has written. Last night she told me she was taking dictation from Jesus. But it is a lovely poem. I don’t have the heart to tell her that all if it is coming from her. As she reads, her hand plays an imaginary melody only she can hear. She thinks she is channeling things. I understand that. As a writer I am always channeling information. My mother was always channeling things too. But it got the best of her. And she let go of the thin grasp of the here and now. It’s a fine line we all straddle. I wrote hear and now. I realize that slip of the tongue is correct. It is what we hear and it is always now. Things that make up our lives, are trivial, after all. It’s what we do with the garden of our minds that’s important. We have made an unwritten pact. She tells me more stories, she is grateful that I am not freaking out. No one wants to face death alone but inevitably we are always alone. She wants me to use the word reincarnation, she tells me that she will be back. She tells me this again and again. Her attention span is shrinking. She tells me her job here is to translate the galactic language. When she talks of that realm that she goes to a place that I cannot follow. Nor do I want to. For me, this is not a place I want to visit, for there is no return. She banishes the word death from the conversation. Begone! This is the year of the myriad untold deaths. We have lost count. But we both know what its name is. I tell her there is a Swedish word for death cleaning—döstädning (“dö” which means death, and “standing,” which means cleaning). But I have to transliterate it for her, I have to use her language. We call it reincarnation cleansing. I mop the floors. She laughs, loves the concept, and says yes! Yes! I tell her I love her. She laughs, says, we are like family, and tells me again about the grand piano, and I ask how will they move the piano? And she tells me, No no. You don’t need to know. But I’ve already worked it out in my head, how the piano will be moved. All I wanted to know was how it got into her small trailer home via a narrow sliding glass door, and how it will get out again. It occupies centerstage of her abode. A massive gleaming beast filled with family photos. She asks me what will I do with the family photos, and I tell her that the children will want them. She sits down and plays a classical riff. I don’t know if it’s from memory or if it’s something new. She lives between complex worlds of music and air. She tells me her children will know what to do. And I explain, that it’s not about who is going to do it, it’s my need to know how things are done. I have a mind like that. I explain how dyslexia works like a puzzle. When I learned to read, late on the childhood horizon, but I had the inability to understand the questions being asked of me, haunted me and that all writing is a process of discovery. How to move the piano is how I navigate life, I need to know the story behind the story, call it the nuts and bolts. I say metaphor. She laughs, points to the bolts that hold the legs on. Smacks them like a horse. She says that the piano movers will know what to do. She gets it, that is how I process. The how, not just the why—the story behind the story is as important as the doing. The nuts and bolts. It’s all in the language we speak.