the a
Pavel's piano is in the living room, an old upright Petrof. He tuned other people's pianos for forty years, and ours more than any of them.
Since October the A above middle C has gone flat. Only that one. When I play anything, which is not often, it's the first thing I hear. I know three people who could fix it in twenty minutes. I haven't called any of them.
I'm reading Life Is Elsewhere, about a young poet who is sure that real life is happening somewhere else, without him. At 63 I find him exhausting.
Saturday night. I played one of Pavel's Smetana pieces badly, with the wrong A, and left the lid open.