PIANO PARTS 

A woman found a box filled with old piano keys in a dumpster. She took the box to a music store. They told her the keys were real ivory and ebony, which they don’t use anymore to make keyboards.

Next day, the same woman found another box, this time containing piano strings, and took it to the store again. Those, she was informed, were very good quality iron strings, but replaced by carbon strings since 1834.

The woman kept finding different piano parts, in the same dumpster. One day it was a set of pedals. Another day it was a stretcher bar or the top board. It looked like somebody in the neighborhood was dismantling and disposing of a very old piano. She felt a strange sadness about the abandoned pieces, and gave them protection in the basement of her house.

One day, there were no more piano parts in the dumpster. Every piece, from the felt hammers to the beautiful golden frame had been stored in the woman’s basement. She could only imagine how beautiful it must have sounded in its day. She called the music store man and offered him good money to put the piano back together again. He couldn’t: pianos like that one didn’t exist anymore, and neither did the craftsmen who built them.

The woman died a few years later, and her house was sold. The new owners found the piano parts in the basement, and took them to the dumpster, a few pieces each day.