The Skillful Worker

Inside the Las Vegas New Mexico High School Gym.

The Skillful Worker

I have always been lucky and some of the luckiest things that have happened to me were to get divorced twice, quit my high-paying university teaching job, go broke, do dumb laboring-class work all over the world and spend some of my adult years back at home with my parents.

Many parents can't stand the sight of their own children and can't wait to get them out of the house but my parents relished having their children around, even when we were grown up.

For a year or so, I was like a full-time gardener for my parents---and I considered the entire mountainside behind their A-frame house overlooking the Ventura River near Ojai, California, our backyard garden.

I made a little concrete goldfish pond, a funky outdoor chapel, and a winding path to the top of the hill ("Laughing Mountain", Mom called it.) and made a lot of other "property improvements to other people's property" as we used to say.

Every afternoon at four, Dad and I would meet at the kitchen bar-table and he would pour two small glasses of Gallo port wine. We would click glasses and he would start to talk. He had some stories about his life experiences and was one of the best storytellers I have ever heard. He had a very dry, deadpan Norwegian sense of humor, which I may have inherited.

I called our afternoon meetings "The Children's Hour" after Longfellow's poem, and Dad always thought that was funny.

One of his stories was about a blind piano tuner.

When Dad was quite young, about 21, I suppose, he worked as a Circulation Manager for the Albuquerque Tribune newspaper. Part of his job was to visit towns all over New Mexico connected by rail—not highway-- in those days to arrange for the "big city" newspapers to be sold.

One day he was in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He was through there often and stayed at a hotel, which was frequented by travelling salesmen and such.

There was a blind piano tuner staying at the same hotel. This blind man would go from little town to little town tuning pianos for schools and for those wealthy people who had them in their homes. Dad said that in the "old days" of his youth there was not much work that a blind person could do, but tuning pianos was one thing a blind person could do as well as a person with sight.

It happened that the blind piano tuner was late coming back to the hotel one evening and the hotel owner got worried about him. Maybe the blind man had had an accident--maybe he had fallen into a ditch or something--so the hotel owner asked Dad to walk out and try to find the blind man. The hotel owner knew that the piano tuner had gone to the high school to tune the piano in their auditorium. So, Dad checked the route the blind man would probably have walked without finding him. by the time Dad had reached the high school it was dark.

Dad said he found the gymnasium door, which was unlocked, and went in. He called and the blind man answered from the stage at the other end of the building

"The room was pitch black dark until I found and turned on the lights," Dad said. "I found the blind man working on the stage surrounded by parts of the piano which he was repairing. There were pieces of that piano all over the stage and before I turned on the lights it was totally dark! Of course that didn't matter to a blind man, but it was a big surprise to me. How did he remember where all the parts were?"

After sixty years, Dad was still amazed by this, to him, wonderful feat.

Tomasito, 2008

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