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The
Old Man’s Truck
by Don Baker
Piano Tuner
by Gene Fehler
Ellis Shoop enters our parlor a quiet evening,
where photos of our only son
watch him carry a straight-backed chair
(comfort for the pain
of bending over millions of keys);
he sits at our Baldwin piano,
listening with what he calls “tin ears”
to tings and pings and twangs and plunks,
to dissonance in octaves.
Shoop speaks to us of CBS-owned Steinways,
the New York Yankees of concert pianos
(our son, the Yankee fan, would have cheered);
he speaks to us of Bosendorfers,
the $35,000 Viennese concert grands,
the Rolls-Royce of pianos
with nine extra keys in the base;
this to my wife and me
to whom an octave beyond Middle C
is unexplored jungle.
His knees ache from years of using
legs as jacks for holding up grand pianos –
bad knees, bad back (the universal pain
of trying to keep things upright),
but the ears haven’t failed him,
the tone still rings true,
the tuning fork matching pitch
to artist’s ears while his
twenty-eight-year-old tuning hammer
(“should be called a wrench,” he says)
tightens copper strings.
Shoop finishes with a medley to check the tone,
plays a song our son learned only last year;
Shoop plays by ear, never had a lesson,
anything he can hear he can play
“as natural as talking,” he says,
“the fingers just know where to go”;
he leaves with his straight-backed chair
and his black bag
to where another family waits amid cacophony
for some saving hands to help them find again
an illusory harmony.
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