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Musical Feeding Frenzy

The Source

I had once seen a feeding frenzy in Tahiti. We were dining at an idyllic little café that actually stuck out over the lapping waves of the Pacific. The sun was a fiery red balloon being slowly punctured by the horizon and I had finished my supper just as the waiter came to collect our plates. Instead of taking the remaining scraps to the kitchen, he simply tossed the crumbs, bones, and bits into the ocean just a few feet away. Wham! A thousand sharks…okay, perhaps four, but when you live in pretty-much-shark-less Arenzville, four sharks resemble a whole army of teeth and fins… A thousand sharks split the surface of the water and hungrily devoured everything the waiter had tossed our way. This was a little show he did several times nightly for unsuspecting and shocked tourist. “That’s our garbage disposal,” he said, and walked away. It was then that I looked down to notice that I’d involuntarily pulled my bare sandaled toes up under my chair. I mean those scrap-scarfing monsters were no more than three feet from my two feet! But the really ugly feeding frenzy came on a trip through Austria and Germany. We had perhaps 20 in our group from Central Illinois and four of us played piano. I was probably the least capable of the group, but I counted myself among the key tinklers in our little band of travelers. We’d been nearly two weeks crisscrossing Europe and in all that time we’d never seen a single piano. Oh, we’d viewed our share of unapproachable church organs and the occasional Bavarian accordion, but as the fates would have it, we had yet to spy the 88 black and white keys that every pianist learns to love. In a word, we were desperate. In two words, we were piano starved. This is not something I’d anticipated. When I travel I can go two weeks without a cell phone, an electric shaver, my own brand of toilet paper, and it had never dawned upon me what effect a piano fast would have on my soul. I’ll admit…my fingers were beginning to itch. They were going into tonal withdrawal. Then it happened…an otherwise non-descript hotel somewhere in the folds of the Austrian hills, a dingy little lobby, and….and…..and there it was. A piano. Not much of a piano, but a piano. I’ve played bad pianos and this looked like the invading German army had unsuccessfully tortured it in the last war, but by golly it was a piano. Any port in a storm, any piano in a pinch. Looking back I can’t imagine it possible that all four pianists saw the piano at the same time, but we did. I think we did. Our tour guide was standing on a chair giving us vital information about the night’s dinner, our next day’s schedule, and the location of our rooms, but he’d completely lost the attention of our quartet of piano plunkers. We were looking at that piano. I think I can remember drooling. We began to edge our way toward the instrument. We bumped into each other as we jockeyed for position. As soon as our tour guide concluded what seemed like an endless monologue on the comparatively unimportant matter of where we were to sleep, we were going to devour that piano…flats and all. The rest of the guests started hauling baggage up to their rooms but the three panting pianists dashed for the piano. It was locked. Locked! Why does anyone ever lock a piano? Bad little boys and girls do not grow up to become international terrorists or talk radio hosts. They become piano lockers. We pulled, we prodded, we pried, we cried. There we were, mere inches away from Nirvana and someone had cruelly slammed the doors of Eden upon our hungry fingers. The four of us spent a sleepless night dreaming of the morning when the clerk with the key would arrive and we’d get our fix. I’ve heard guitarists say they suffer the same affliction when forced to go days without a set of strings under their fingers. I asked a friend of mine, a professional guitarist, what would happen if he had to go days without playing. He looked at me as if I’d busted a brain string and said, “I’d never let that happen.” I suppose there are worse addictions. Drugs. Cell phones. The Home Shopping Network. But it’s as real as any obsession and in some parts of the world a great deal harder to obtain than illegal substances. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to Tahiti, but if I do I’ll have a new sympathy for the sharks.