A Bizarre Visit to Boston

We are in Boston with the express purpose of delivering a car to Rachel. We arrived on Thursday evening and she has worked most of the time we have been here. She works in 2 different restaurants, where many of the staff are now on vacation. This experience will in the long run serve to remind her why she is getting a getting a degree and why she doesn’t want to have anything to do with the food industry for a living.

David’s secondary purpose for coming to Boston was to hook up a printer to Rachel’s now aging laptop computer. Sounds simple enough. But it has taken him most of his waking hours and he has been on the phone with idiots in India who have been trying to troubleshoot long-distance to no avail. The end result is that there is still no working printer hooked up to the computer and our plane leaves in just 5 hours.

We had a couple of dinner experiences with the parents of Rachel’s housemates, that even included Rachel on Friday night. It was fun to discover just how much we have in common.

And me – what have I been doing over this long 4-day weekend? I brought my music with me in the hope that I might find a practice piano. I found the music department on Friday morning. The only pianos that I found in the unlocked practice rooms were so bad that they were virtually unplayable. Then I ran into a woman who was tuning pianos who let me into a locked room containing 2 Steinway grands. A big improvement!

On Saturday I wasn’t initially so lucky. When I arrived the building was locked up tight. I say a Tufts policeman out front and persuaded him to let me in and disable the alarm system. Then I started wandering around looking for a piano. I finally found a real prize in a room that should have been locked, but wasn’t. So my accomplishment for the weekend was 4 rewarding hours of practice on pianos much bigger and nicer than my Baldwin Acrosonic. Why did I need to come all the way to Boston to play the piano?