Goodbye, Dear Friend

Corey bought this piano for me as my birthday present eight years ago. When we went piano shopping, we were just looking for an upright. However, the store we bought the piano from got this piano in by mistake and were selling it for $6500, even though it was worth more than double that. Since we owned a house at the time and had a perfect spot for it, we decided to go for it.

When the piano was delivered to our house, I was so excited! I had wanted a piano ever since we were married two years before. Nothing could burst my bubble, even the fact that the piano store sent the wrong, a semi-broken, bench with the piano.

We decided to do a rent-to-own plan instead of just getting a loan, which seemed like a good idea at the time. However, we didn’t know that if we moved during the rent-to-own period, the piano store would take the piano back. After we owned it for a year, we sold our house (another story) and moved into a townhome. About a month later, we received a notice from the piano store that said if we didn’t pay for the piano in full within a month, then they would take it away. At the time, we didn’t have enough money to pay the rest of what we owed on the piano. But, with some help and a few miracles, we paid the payment in full and we were able to keep our piano.

Because of the rent-to-own incident and because the bench ended up being more broken than we realized, my love for the piano turned into a love/hate relationship. I loved it because it was a piano and I could play it, but I hated it because I didn’t really play it with the bench as broken as it was. I became kind of bitter towards it, even though it wasn’t the piano’s fault. Then, of course, with human nature being the way it is, I found more and more bad things about the piano, like the fact that Corey and I were sacrificing our dining room to have a place for it in our townhome.

I kept hinting to Corey that I wanted to sell it and get an upright, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep it because it was our only real asset. However, because we needed the money to invest in Corey’s business and because of my love/hate relationship with the piano, we’ve been trying to sell it for the past five months or so. We finally sold it and it was moved out this morning.

I’m glad that we sold it.  But, now that it’s gone, I miss it. I guess it’s kind of funny how we have tunnel vision about something for so long that we can’t see any other possibilities. And, once something happens to lift our tunnel vision, all the other possibilities open up and we realize the mistakes we’ve made.