While I was in Mexico City over spring break, I had a beer at a brew pub called The Falling Piano.
The name spoke to me. It’s how I talk about the D-word. Instead of saying, “when I die,” I say, “when I’m crushed by a falling piano.”
It turns my demise into a cartoon, perhaps what Paul Simon had in mind when he wrote “don’t wanna end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard,” except that’s exactly how I do want to end up, given that we all have to end up somewhere.
It has to do with all the toons I watched as a kid. And it has to do with my New York/Jewish impulse to turn as many serious things as possible into jokes.
A Ukrainian saying applies:
“When things are bad, we cry. When things are very bad, we dance. When things are very, very bad, we laugh.”
The saying may explain why Ukraine elected a Jewish president. It explains the entire history of satire, including my favorite form of satire, the editorial cartoon.
Lately I’ve been getting pinged by a series of falling toy pianos. The first one was a plumbing problem. The flow of water from my kitchen faucet suddenly became a trickle. We didn’t have time to fix it before spring break, so we had that to look forward to upon our return.
Then came the bird poop scam, Mexico City edition, chronicled in my previous column.
The day after we got home from Mexico, I went downstairs to make my morning coffee and couldn’t help noticing that the house was unusually cold. I checked the oil tank in the basement. Empty.
Our fuel supplier, unbeknownst to me, and for reasons I still do not understand, had taken us off its regular delivery schedule.
We are hardy souls, but houseguests were coming. Fortunately for them, we got resupplied before they arrived. We also got the kitchen faucet running again, sort of. It’s no longer a trickle, but it’s not exactly blasting food scraps off dinner plates, either. Further investigation awaits.
While our guests were here, I gave them a house key, which had been attached to one of our car fobs. I thought I had detached house key from car key.
Our guests left, as all houseguests eventually do. Back home, they felt “something unusual in the lining” of one of their jackets, which, you guessed it, had a hole in one of the pockets. There floated our house key.
No biggie. Just mail it to us.
But then we couldn’t find the fob. The obvious explanation was that it was with the house key. But I remembered detaching one from the other, remember? And our house guests didn’t think they had the key to the car, only the key to the house.
So we searched the pockets of all our coats and jackets and pants and looked through all the drawers and reusable grocery bags and every place else we could think of where a key might wander off to when no one’s looking. In vain.
On Monday, I called the dealer, whose rundown of the replacement costs went like this:
Fob – $197
Key – $27
Fob programming labor: $150.
Total – $374.
My response. “I think I’ll turn the house inside out again.”
Which I did. Nada.
An hour later, the FedEx van arrived. I ripped open the box. There was the house key, attached, as ever it was, to the fob. The mind plays tricks.
And speaking of keys, last week, for the first time in my long career at Penn State, I left the keys to my office in my office.
Also this past week: an explosion on Saturday afternoon, followed by a four-hour power outage. Our washing machine seems to be a casualty – fried by a surge, perhaps. Don’t know yet.
These aren’t tales of woe I’m telling you, but of discombobulation. You can save your sympathy for those whose lives are one long outage: of power, clean water, heat, reliable transportation. I read too much news and have watched too many cartoons to get bent out of shape by mere discombobulations.
You know how in cartoons when a character gets pianoed or anviled or safed, they shake their head a few times and make the sound a rubber-tipped flexible doorstop makes when you bend it as far as it will go and then release it? That’s been me this month.
Maybe it’s March, a discombobulating month if ever there was one: winter one day, spring the next, then back to winter…
My secret to taking things in stride: When things are bad, I laugh. When things are very bad, I laugh. When things are very, very bad, I laugh.
Or try to.
If you’re ever in Mexico City, grab a chela (beer in Mexican Spanish) at The Falling Piano. A concert grand hangs from the ceiling. It appears to be falling. My kind of place.
