One Man's Secret to a Long and Happily Married Life

A year ago, in commemoration of our 41^st wedding anniversary, I posted on Facebook a picture of  my wife Jackie and I sitting on the hood of my ’66 Dodge Dart, in front of the U-Haul truck that we (and my brother and sister-in-law, Gerry Kahle and Alicia Kahle along with my two friends Larry MacDonald and Charley Markey) had just unloaded up to our new 3rd floor apartment in Mt. Ranier, Maryland. In that post, I wrote this: 

This photo was taken a few weeks after the happy event, when we packed everything we had (including Jackie's piano, which was a story in itself) into a U-Haul truck and headed off to Washington DC so I could start grad school at Catholic University. 

So, to commemorate our 42nd anniversary, I thought I’d relate that story; a story about the piano that Jackie’s mom, Ruth, had bought for her (when she was about nine years old) with some money her father, Jackie’s grandpa John Falkowski, had left her upon his passing.   It sat in their house, up on the second floor, where it had no doubt been hauled by experienced piano movers up the long, steep, narrow staircase from the front door of the house, and into the living room.

On the day we prepared to move from Jersey City to Maryland, me, Jackie, her brother Gerry, and my high school buddy Larry, are hauling the last boxes and pieces of small furniture out of the apartment and into the truck. All that is left is the piano. We look at the piano, and then at the long, steep, narrow staircase down to the front door and the street. It’s a little piano, just a small spinet, so how hard can this be – three strapping young guys should be able to pick this thing up and carefully muscle it down the stairs and into the truck no problem, right? We all learned a few interesting facts that day -- little spinet pianos are heavier than they look, and trying to maneuver a piano down a staircase without dollies or other mechanical assistance, and with barely enough room for one person to fit on the stairs at a time, was something that really should have involved a lot more forethought and planning on our parts before actually trying to move the thing. After much grunting, sweating and several passable attempts at giving ourselves hernias, we realized that simply picking it up and carrying it down the stairs was not going to work.

I don’t know who finally came up with with the idea, which in retrospect was a really stupid one (but born of sheer desperation), but regardless of its origin, we all eventually agreed that the only thing to do was to turn the piano completely upside-down, onto its head. We then attached a piece of rope to both front legs of it and wrapped the rope for several turns around the newel post at the top of the stairs. We then proceeded to slide the piano down the stairs, with Larry and Gerry holding on to the rope and guiding its descent, and me holding on to the front side of it as I slowly pulled it over each step as I backed down the stairs. Jackie claims she left the house not to get out of our way, but because she didn’t want to witness both her brother and her new husband getting killed on the same day by a runaway upside-down piano. 

We actually managed to get the piano down the stairs (the scars on the top of it are there to this day), turned it right-side up, and pushed it up the ramp and into the truck. Congratulating ourselves on a job well done (except for the messed-up top and the fact that all the keys had shifted to the left), we locked the truck for the night and readied ourselves for the trip to Maryland the next day. The trip was uneventful, and all of us were able to make quick work of moving our belongings up the three flights of winding steps into our new digs. Except for the piano. We realized there was no way on God’s green earth that we’d be able to haul that piano up and around each turn of that stairwell; we weren’t even sure it would fit. 

The photo below captures the precise moment when we had all finally caved in to the inevitable -- the piano would have to stay in the truck. Fortunately, the story has a reasonably happy ending, and one that didn’t involve gifting the U-Haul corporation with a slightly damaged spinet. We found a phone booth (remember those?) with a phone book at the local sandwich shop. We further found a listing for local piano movers in said phone book, whom we called and to whom we explained our dilemma. After they stopped snickering, they promised to come around on Monday (we had moved down on a Saturday) which they did, first thing, and effortlessly hoisted the piano up the stairs and into our apartment. The truck was returned to U-Haul with only hours to spare, my brother and sister-in-law and all our friends got safely back to New Jersey, and we managed to stay married all these years.

And we still have the piano.