The Piano Guys

Alright, let’s start with the great news: It snowed! We got about 3 inches of snow, which are rookie numbers if you ask me, but hey, I’m just glad we have snow. I miss the mountains and climate of the greatest of the 50 states (Colorado), but snow is snow.

We’re trying to teach people here, and the best source we have is Facebook, so that’s what we’re using. You’d be surprised how many people will accept a friend request if you just have mutual friends, so we’re starting conversations with people, and then they leave us on read a lot of the time, but that’s ok, because there are a few that actually talk to us.

The highlight of the week had to be helping this guy move a piano. One of the great things about being a missionary is that if you tell people you’re willing to drive 40 minutes to help them move a piano, they let you! So we drove 40 minutes to this random dude’s apartment and we found the piano outside in the parking lot, and we met the guy. He told us we just had to move this piano around to the other side of the building, and throw it in a storage shed. He told us that this piano was a hundred years old, and it had ivory keys, and mahogany wood, just really selling us on how priceless this glorious instrument was, and why he didn’t want to get rid of it. So we start pushing it, because it had wheels, but my guess would be that those wheels hadn’t been moved in about 40 years, and we just scraped them along the sidewalk, leaving a nice trail behind of our progress. But we got it to the shed, and opened up the door. We managed to get the front half in, and then we shoved the other part in, and turned it and it fit like a glove! At least that’s what I’d like to say.

In fact, this piano rammed into the wall, and there was no way it was going to fit. Well, the guy just said we have to push harder, despite it already boring into the wall. But he started to go, so we joined him, and it just made a hole in the wall. Yikes. This was an apartment-owned shed. And I had gotten behind the piano to try and drag it from the inside, and I was now trapped, surrounded by LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF DEAD SPIDERS.

Yahoo.

But he goes off to get some “tools” to help get this piano in. And I’m looking at Elder Miller like, “The only tools that could get this piano into this shed would be a woodchipper and a chainsaw.” There was no way we were getting this piano in. But we were like, “Yo let’s say a prayer!” Classic missionary move. So we do that, and the guy gets back. He’s got a flathead screwdriver and a hammer: the tools of a master. Or a madman. And he’s eyeballing this piano, looking at where it’s running into the frame, and then he’s like, “Well, I guess the front’s gotta go.” And then he just starts pounding this screwdriver into the front of the piano!! After a good couple minutes of him destroying a priceless artifact, he rips the front end off the piano and we give it another push. Well, we got about another 2 inches into the room, but we had 9 more to go. Progress.

Well, since he didn’t want to deface this piece of American history anymore, he decided that the doorframe was next to go. He slides the screwdriver into the crack in the wood, and just goes to town. Well, that only got us a little bit further. Rinse and repeat that one, with him removing more and more of this door frame, as we shove it into this room and make the hole in the wall bigger. He kept finding more and more property to destroy to try to make this piano fit and at one point was busting the hole in the wall open with his hammer to try and make more space. After an hour and a half of me stuck in 4 square feet of fun, and this man creating property damage so expensive he could pay for my mission, he started to lose hope, and started to gain a more “broad” vocabulary. Well, we had places to be, and we were hoping this would be an in and out experience, but we told him we had to go, and he was pacing around cussing up a storm. So I was just like, “Alright, one more time.” And we all brace ourselves and push with everything we got. AND THROUGH SHEER MIRACLE, THE PIANO ENTERED INTO THE SHED!! Along with the door frame, the sill, and part of the wall. We had gotten this piano in, and I could hear the announcer of that one show going, “SHOW US…. THE HOLE IN THE WALL!!” There really wasn’t much of a door frame on one side of the hole, and this historic artifact had been messed up in the process. But the guy was glad to have the piano in, and I was just glad to be out of that shed. When he surveyed all the damage he had done, he was just like, “I got a friend that can do some wood work, and I’ll have him fix this door up real nice.” And we’re just like, “DAWG IT’S GONNA TAKE A WHOLE NEW DOOR TO FIX THE DAMAGE YOU DID!” We didn’t say that, but we sure were thinking it. That piano and shed were damaged beyond repair, but our prayer was answered. He also said he’d be willing to listen to our message!! So you gotta take what you can get. I can’t do the story justice, but it was a sight to behold. The piano also sounded like it was screaming in pain every time he tried to smash another piece of it off.

Other than that, not too many crazy things happened. I learned I can hide pens in my hair and had one in all throughout a dinner with these people, but other than that, nothing much. The piano was the best I’ve got, and for some reason the pictures aren’t uploading, so we’ll try to get those in next week.

Thanks for reading this (if you did), and have a great week!

Over and Out

SHOUTOUTS:

  • Colorado – Actually the best state out there, from its great weather, to its mountains. It’s also got water that tastes better than all the other water I have ever drinken. And if you didn’t think there was a difference in water taste between states, I can assure you there is. Utah water is practically motor oil in comparison to the nectar of the gods back in Colorado.