[Exhausted after moving an organ]
I agreed sometime during the daylight hours to help friends move an organ. It was something that I had done in passing while the sun was still out, full well knowing that I had meetings that would run through the evening hours and then some business to catch up on thereafter. I arrived for the move late, close to midnight. Tripp was busy scrubbing the baseboard in his room while Zach gathered trash bags to set out on the curb. June 30th with a July 1st deadline to vacate the house. Moving is something that is rarely accomplished with any time left to spare. It is a sport for procrastinators.
At midnight, the house was almost clean. The only things left were details. A few boxes here and there, a little cleaning, and the chore of capturing one of Tripp’s semi-feral cats from the crawl space where it had barricaded itself against the impending move. The basement appeared as a coal shaft, lightless, humid, hot. At it’s narrowest point, little more than three feet separated the subfloor of the house from the dirt and junk that had been backfilled into the void over the course of decades. Mining for cats, or so it appeared as Tripp drug a work-light into the dusty abyss.
Within an hour, the cat had given up. Tired of running tiny laps through its subterranean hideout, the kitty carrier became the easiest option for a beast inclined towards idleness. With the cat back in the bag, the final task of the night shifted to the original goal of delivering the organ to its new home on the other side of the city.
Musical instruments, like cameras, are things that change hands. They are tools that creative people hate to see wasted such that when it becomes untenable to keep them any longer, they are not tossed out with the garbage. These things are passed on to other people with the hope that, in their next life, they will no longer sit idle, rather be the channel through which masterpieces are moved. Zach’s oversized church organ, a solid block of wood and electronics weighing in at only slightly less than a full-size upright piano, had sat broken in the back room of the old rental for a period of years before the move-out gave him the impetus to find a new home for it. John, a musician and de facto dead organ junk-piler, had amassed a small heap of the bulky instruments in the back of his warehouse space. A perfect fit. He agreed to take it. Perhaps he would be able to fix it or, perhaps, it would make an interesting prop to fill space between the cinder block walls. Either way, it was better than dumping it in the alley.
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