Mourn the Downed Wildebeest

The move is done and I'm in Roanoke now. To tell the truth, I'm kind of having a rough time of it. I keep telling myself it's going to get better, and I'm sure it really is going to get better, but for the first time in my life I'm honestly homesick. Embarrassingly so. Bordering on huddle-in-a-blanket-and-cry-on-the-floor homesick. Making matters worse, I lost a dear friend on moving day: My piano. If you've ever known me, you've known my funky old piano. My dad bought it at an army surplus auction when I was about 3 years old and brought it home on the back of his big orange work truck. It turns out that before it was auctioned to dad, it had been through the Korean war, the Viet Nam war, then got sold a few different times over the years to a few different military families who each painted it a different hideous shade of brown or green. It was a dismal burnt-caramel brown color when it finally came to live with us. The auction lot number was still written on the front in black magic marker, and took many years to fully scrub off. I was the only kid in my family who ever really learned to play it, plus I spent several long messy days stripping off all those hideous paint layers, so when I finished high school my parents gave the piano to me. It has moved with me 8 times since then. From Eagar to Tucson, then to another apartment in Tucson, a house in Tucson, an apartment in Rochester, a house in Rochester, another apartment in Rochester, and another one after that. At the second Rochester apartment, it lost a wheel in the process of going down 9 steps when I moved in or perhaps while coming back up those 9 steps when I moved out (...my deepest apologies to the inevitable hernias induced in the 3 guys who helped get it back up those stairs). And then it made its final move to Roanoke, where even though the landlord had promised the apartment would be ground floor and the piano would roll right in, there were five steps to climb up to reach the door. There was no way to get it in. I don't know 3 strong guys here. There was no affordable way to put it in storage. So it sat in the moving truck, homeless, for a full day while I thought about how to avoid saying goodbye to it. I didn't win. I decided to donate it to Goodwill. As a final insult to injury, during the drive to Goodwill it suddenly spun around in the otherwise-empty truck and fell down flat on its back on the floor. BOOM. Looking at it like that -- with all of its keys lifted out of place like old yellowed teeth trying to fall out of an old brown mouth, and its lid flown open, and its front panel popped from its hinges, and its legs in the air -- it looked like a dying wildebeest. I found some highway maintenance workers mowing grass on the nearby roadside and asked them to help me stand it back up (...my sincerest apologies yet again, for causing three more hernias, but my sincerest thanks to these three pallbearers). Then I rolled it into Goodwill. They said they're going to auction it off. Maybe at the auction the high bidder will be a hard-working man who'll drive it home on the back of his big orange work truck and let his 3-year-old daughter learn to play it. Maybe. I want to go home.