My Commonplace Book

So, today I lost two long-loved objects within an hour. One was intentional, one was not. But I'm sad about both of them.

After I got the upright piano from freecycle, I had three large keyboard instruments in my living room: My spinet piano, the upright piano, and my old Wurlitzer Model 4037 organ that I had for about 35 years.




It had a lot of bells and whistles for its era. It had a third manual (the topmost keyboard) that's actually an early synthesizer; a Spectra-Tone rotating speaker; and a built-in cassette player so you could record your own playing, play things back through the organ's speakers, and even play duets with yourself! It had a really beautiful sound.

That organ moved with me six times, and I've gotten a lot of pleasure playing it. But for the last five or ten years I've been attracted more and more to purely acoustic music, to the point where I just wasn't interested in playing an electronic organ any more.

In the 1960s and 70s those spinet organs were very popular, but they've lost ground to synthesized keyboards and fancier electronics. I looked on eBay and found only a few organs of that type being offered, and none of them had any bids at all. I knew I could freecycle it easily but I wanted it to be worth something, so I donated it to my UU church's silent auction and set a minimum bid of $50. That's what it got: One bid of $50. But I was pleased that it sold and that the church will get some money for it.

But the auction was in November and I had a lot of trouble getting the buyer to pick it up. It turned out that the husband wanted it for the break room in his motorcycle dealership, which has some music-loving employees. He finally came today with a couple of guys and a pickup truck, and they took the organ. It was in the way, I wanted it gone, I'm glad it's gone ... but I'm still sad about losing it. I had it for so long, and gotten so much joy and pleasure out of it. It was one of the few links to my former lives. I can still see it in my first house on Long Island ... the 2-room upstairs apartment in an illegally-divided Cape Cod on Long Island ... my rented townhouse in Virginia where my gray cat Dawn once let a mouse run inside it, got bored waiting for it to come out and walked away ... my tiny 1,043-square-foot house in West Virginia ... my beloved house in the woods in Maryland ... and finally the living room here where, due to the vagaries of the room's shape, size and window placement, it was the focal point opposite the sofa.

And now it's gone. And so is the lamp that was in the living room, which I loved. Not sentimentally, thank goodness -- it can be recreated. But I don't want to recreate it ... I liked it just as it was. It was on the end table next to the wing chair that was next to the organ. The end table was right next to the window on the side, and the lamp looked very good there. I had a beautifully-colored sarong with jewel-tones of greens, blues, and dark violet-pink (roughly like this) which went beautifully with the Williamsburg blues and dusty pinks of the furniture, and I arranged it in a carefully artless pattern inside the clear glass ginger jar lamp base. I loved the way it looked -- it was an accent with just the right amount of vivid color. 

I like to have a lamp on in the house after dark. It's easier to come in when there's a little bit of light -- if you're carrying something you can walk in without having to fumble for the light switch, and it's more welcoming than coming in to a pitch-dark house. You can turn off the kitchen light and walk over to the stairs without having to make an extra trip to the bottom of the stairs to turn the stair lights on first. And it helps discourage burglars, who might think somebody's home. I've had a lamp on a timer for many years, set to come on around dusk and go off around my bedtime. In this house, that was the lamp the timer was on. It's a good place for it, because I have a two-story living room so there's a little light on the second floor too, and it shows through windows on both floors, making the house look occupied.

When I got the upright piano everything in the room had to shift. I pushed the organ over so it was where the wing chair and the end table used to be, and put those somewhere else. I put the lamp on the organ, where it was pretty much in the same place.

But today, getting ready for B___ to come and pick up the organ, I put it temporarily on a padded dining-room chair that was in front of the window, next to the organ. I looked perfectly steady, and I continued moving things around to get them out of the way. Then I went upstairs to rest for a little while from pushing furniture around. I was at the computer when I heard a horrible crash. What was that?! It sounded like glass breaking ... did a picture fall off the wall? I ran downstairs -- everything looked normal. I turned the corner and went into the living room ... and there was the lamp on the floor, shattered.

Did a cat jump up to get to the window sill? Was it just unsteady, tipping as imperceptibly as the minute hand on a clock until it finally just tipped over? I'll never know. I managed to get the sarong out without ripping it on the sharp edges of the broken glass, picked up the larger pieces, and got the vacuum cleaner to clean up the bits. I kept the lamp, thinking maybe I'll make a base out of something creative, though I have no idea what. I guess I'll throw it out tomorrow -- I can always get lamp parts and make a new lamp.

Meanwhile I put another lamp there just to have the light, but it's not a permanent solution. The shade is still good -- maybe I can find a cheap clear-glass lamp at Wal-mart or Target.

Neither of the items I lost were terribly important in and of themselves. It's just that I had had the organ with me for so long, and I'd inherited the glass lamp, so it's just two more pieces of my past life that are gone. The feeling is wistfulness rather than grief, but it's still sadness.