Lift

Russel, Ralph, and Homer Robison
Circa 1924

 “It took four of us to get this piano on the truck.”  My brother told me a few weeks ago while standing in my driveway.  A light rain added unwanted drama to our chore.

I glanced at my cousin, the former college lineman, and then back to my sibling, the former construction worker turned farmer.

“But there’s just three of us.”  I replied, glancing down at my own biceps, taught from years of grading papers.

My cousin nodded as he unlocked the tailgate. “Yep.”

Somehow, though, we did move the piano.  As promised, it was much heavier than it looked, but still we somehow grunted it off the truck, across the concrete driveway, and into my living room.  Fortunately it has wheels; fortunately my two relatives are not built like me.

Now the piano sits, cozy, decorated with framed photographs, occasionally being plinked on and plunked upon by one of my children, but really it just waits for the day it will be put into beautiful use, after years and years of lessons.  At least this is the narrative I have promised by wife, who is thus far less than thrilled that yet another piece of furniture has been added to our already cluttered home.

The piano had to go somewhere, though.  My grandfather Ralph, who would have turned ninety-six this past Valentine’s Day, no longer needs it as accompaniment to his banjo.  Over the next two years my brother will update his old farm house, and in these new blueprints no piano sits.

Of all the grandchildren, I guess it makes sense I inherit this heirloom of an instrument.  Our newborn daughter has very long fingers, we have been told, and thus will make a suitable pianist.

Reflecting on my grandfather’s passing, I suppose funerals can tell us important things about a person.  The size of the crowd can give us hints about the person’s public persona; the eulogies give us the well-edited highlights; the tone of grief can give us clues to other questions:  how old were they?  How sick were they and for how long? 

What was their relationship with God?

We can perhaps get a better gauge of the person’s true character, however, when it comes time to divvy up the socks.

Despite his age, my grandpa Ralph put on his own socks up until this past August, when a fall broke his hip and sent him to the hospital.  The hip was fixed, but he never came home again.  He lingered in a twilight of months, his days filled with whispering nurses, winter sunlight through windows, many visits from family and friends.  We gathered to bury him in late January.  A month later we gathered again, this time to go through his stuff.

We were not a frantic collection of people.  Seven grandchildren, all well into shades of adulthood, drew numbers from a hat.  I was number three, which was fitting, I guess, as I was his third grandchild anyway.  Dad, though, as the lone survivor of grandpa’s three children, could have picked where everything went.  That was his legal right, but it wasn’t his style.

Instead we took turns.  We asked questions, like, “Does anyone want the bed?’ or “Who could use this desk?”  None of us truly needed anything and none of us were in a hurry.  We spent hours ambling from room to room, trying on hats, opening up drawers, laughing at pictures worn from use.

We play-wrestled with various memories, like childhood Christmases, when we all opened up more presents that we deserved, the living room full of crumpled up wrapping paper.

Like sitting in the drive way on upside down five gallon buckets, shucking sweet corn piled high in the back of the truck, or countless Sunday dinners, grownups in the dining room, kids in the kitchen, stories and laughter going back and forth between rooms.

The kindness of this man seems to be a common thread in so many of these memories, and it seemed as though a very real kindness thread itself into this memory, too.  As my father reminded us that morning before we started rummaging, for some families the process of inheritance can be most unkind.  It can be a headache at best and a disaster at worst.  Some families end.

This, though, will not be the case for Ralph’s family.  Granted, many acres of Illinois farmland will now change hands, but it will unlikely change plows.  Season will still fall into season; plant, grow, reap, repeat.  This steadiness has much to say about our grandfather and our grandma Lou and the life they lived, the examples they taught their own children.  This steadiness says more about them, in fact, than perhaps it says about any of us.

In a way, this may be their best legacy all along: a family at peace with itself and with each other, a family lifting up very heavy pianos instead of fighting over them.