"A Sad Farewell" "Wanderings - by Kathrin Goldsworthy (currently NZ)

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From the Web 1.0 days I bring you The Forum. To preserve them for posterity as Geocities can no longer be found but also it's fun to re-read some of them.

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30th May, 2001

This is totally off the subject - but I need to share the heartbreak, the pain, get it off me chest - it's all good therapy. One of the things I have become used to over the past 18 months is saying hello and goodbye to many friends, cities, countries, loved ones……but the hardest and most heartbreaking of all was……my piano.

You may laugh but it was a very cool piano. And I was quite attached to it. AND it was the largest and most valuable thing I owned (most people have cars or houses - me, I have a piano.)
We first got together about oooh, three or four years ago when I went all musical and decided I wanted to start playing again. So thanks to generosity of a dear friend, I inherited an old upright(!!). Next I signed up for lessons with a mad but lovely music teacher - Olga. Now I wasn't exactly the most studious of her pupils, but I had the enthusiasm! No-one has ever played Fur Elise with as much joie de ve as moi, I tell ya...bum notes 'n all. I suspect I may have driven Olga nuts ("You MUST practice Kat-trin" yelled with a very strong German accent), but hey she was making money out of me.

Anyway I digress, back to me piano. It was old and very stylish. We went through so much together - and to so many places. I have shifted that thing several thousand times from one end of Wellington to the other (it never crossed my mind NOT to take it), at great expense and effort. (Who'd be a piano mover in this town? For those of you who don't know it - Wellington is very, very hilly with lots of little houses tucked away in valleys and gullies and on top of ridges, with quite often the only access being narrow, steep winding stairs. Sheesh)

So my piano has lived with my all over this city, and shared all the highs and lows of my life here. Well it had to - as per me…the enthusiasm for lessons lasted a brief time, and the novelty wore off. Apart from the odd drunken sing-a-long, it rarely got a decent workout. BUT, it was a versatile little thing - and made a grand bookcase, shelf, coat hanger…

But alas, like all good things, it had to end. I finally had to face up to the fact that if I wanted to be all glamorous and be a globetrotting fabulous person, we had to part ways. So, a couple of weeks ago, I swallowed that tight knot in my throat, rang the piano dude and sent it off to a good home. (I hope)
It was a sad day, and I couldn't stand to watch it go…so I hid away on the other side of town. Chatting with friends as the transaction went through, someone piped up and said "Oh, I know someone who would love to look after it"…nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!

No, it was time we went our separate ways. In the spirit of letting material possessions go, and keeping only what I can carry, we had to say the final goodbye. And let's face it- you may be able to travel round Ireland with a fridge, but the world with a piano???

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