I bought a stroboscope when I was a teenager and a hammer for turning piano pegs. I thought it might be a decent independent job. It turned out not as simple as that but around the same time I was hired to play in the Winnipeg folk festival and when they asked for a publicity shot, I gave them one from a photo booth I took while holding a sign “I tune pianos 2 8 4 – 3 1 4 1”. This was a long time before the internet.

At a certain point, if you pass being fifty years old you realize you crossed the summit, it’s behind you and now you’re heading down. Who knows how fast you’re traveling, but what’s for sure is life is no longer pointing upwards. The past longer, the future smaller. There was a piano tuner I hired one time, a philosophical person who wanted to talk about Gurdjieff and the movie Meetings with Remarkable Men and eventually I did see the film, even bought the book but couldn’t get through it nor make sense of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, though I thought it a better title. This piano tuner had theories about different scales, that minor scales were mystical and major scales helped self esteem. He’s the one who first told me when you’re young life is a mountain and you’re climbing up. Depending on how high you get you have various views of life and you can’t convey to people much below you, because they can’t see it yet. Me being much younger than him concluded he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Mark tunes the pianos at the Tranzac and is part of the crew of tuners that does the 100 or so at the University of Toronto. He’s blind and gets around by public transportation. I meet him at Dundas West subway station and we walk to my house. He asks what we’re passing on the street. I tell on the car rental business, the new high rise, the grocery store, the coffee shop. After we order coffees, I continue about the residential streets, the parked cars, the various people and their ages. Jonathan, my friend in the distance approaches us, he waves and yells hello. Mark yells back a return hello. Try to give him advance warning each time the ground is changing from ice to cracks or brief valleys. Inside he gets to work and I start to simmer a large pot of anise, cloves and oranges to make the room smell nice imagining other senses are more heightened and appreciated by him. My piano is a Bell, 130 years old. He explains the mechanism is similar to a grand piano as though this is an asset and I don’t follow, but he is honoured to work on a Bell and relay it’s special virtues or maybe flattering what a client owns makes the likelihood of being called again higher.