The Day My Piano Left Dublin

The movers came this morning, and I cried to see my piano go.
 
            It’s spring 2021, and I’m headed back to New York. Do I say I’m moving back home? I think so, though I’m not sure where home is anymore.
 
A lot has happened since moving to Ireland in the summer of 2017.
In August 2018, I divorced my husband. It would have been 29 years that October.
That was a big change.
I made friends with two Indian brothers who ran the corner store, and traveled to a ‘small’ town in India to attend the younger brother’s wedding.
That was a mind-expanding trip.
I made many friends through music and found a new artistic voice as I performed on ethnic flutes or sang (!) in pubs throughout Dublin.
That was freedom.
 
My supervisor says that the fact that I wrote my PhD dissertation in three years is legendary. I thought that was how it was supposed to go, didn’t realize that I could have taken more time. I wrote nine chapters of words and an hour and a half of music.
 
In March of my final year of writing, music in the city stopped dead, grinding its vibrant hum to a halt: covid lockdown.
One week prior to that, I broke my humerus, and it was not at all funny.
 
That was an extremely painful injury, exacerbated by the fact that friends were prohibited from coming to my home to help me. All except for Brew, who was my covid bubble buddy. Thank God for Brew, who called from work to tell me when to take the next pain killer, came by after work to help me with feeding myself or to remake the makeshift bed set up on the living room couch. I had to sleep sitting up for seven weeks, making sure to move the loosely bound arm as little as possible. Peeling a banana became an exercise in ingenuity.
Recovery was a slow and difficult process. Staying still for so long meant that my muscles atrophied, and I pretty much had to convince my arm to work again. I performed three rounds of painful exercises per day. After two months of healing, I propped the healing arm up on the table next to the laptop and used my good hand lift it up into position to guide the mouse. It was back to work.
 
I spent the summer writing many, many hours per day. I felt guilty if I stopped to shower or eat. But it was a glorious time. I was invigorated. The world around me had come to a standstill, and there was nothing to do but choose the right word, finesse my music scores. In a sense, I was really free during the near continuous lockdown.
 
The oral defense of my dissertation took place via video conference. As I type that, I hear the iconic sound of sad trombones. Trinity campus had shut down in March 2020, and – as of this writing,  remains closed to all but a select few.
There were many thresholds to earning the PhD, many small victories along the way. I celebrated when I submitted the dissertation in September, and when I passed the oral defense in November. There were corrections to be made, and I celebrated when those were completed in January. There were hurdles to cross with the unnecessarily complicated process of submitting the final version to the Trinity library, and I celebrated when those were surmounted as well. Each little celebration was conducted via phone or video call, with two exceptions. By spring a second friend, TJ, had been added to my covid bubble, and Brew, TJ, and I shared pizza and prosecco in my little apartment on Chancery Lane.
 
Though it was inevitable, the decision to move back to the States was not made lightly. It’s heartbreaking to leave Dublin before the music comes back, and even more difficult to leave without being able to visit my daughter in Amsterdam. It’s been a year and a half since I’ve seen her, and covid restrictions continue to make that impossible. So close, yet so far! Within the year, she and her kiwi partner will move from Amsterdam to New Zealand.
These are difficult times for many around the world, and academia has been hit hard. Email alerts from four different search sites yield very few opportunities in the US, but zero opportunities in Ireland. I’ll be strapped for cash and without health insurance on either side of the Atlantic, but New York offers a familial and social safety net. My son, mother, and most of my siblings live in the New York area.
So back to my childhood home I go, staying with my mother until the proverbial ship comes in.
 
My friendship with musician buddy, TJ, has grown during the year of near continuous lockdown. At first it was through video, as TJ offered near daily support while I recovered from my broken arm. He had no one in his covid bubble except his wife, and I saw no one but Brew, and so eventually it was agreed that we would expand our bubbles to include each other. What a great comfort that has been, to be able to occasionally share a meal with another human being, to sing and cook together.
            The logistics of moving from one country to another can be overwhelming, and
it was TJ who suggested I board with him and his wife for my last month in Ireland in order to make the transition easier. He performed the herculean task of hauling all of my belongings out of my apartment and into his wife’s car. I don’t have much stuff, but it took two trips to get the it out to his home in the suburbs.  
            The first task after unpacking the car was to set up my piano in TJ’s sitting room. I’m not an expert piano player (flutes and composition are my forte), but I practice and tinkle throughout the day, almost as a reflex, like scratching an itch. Days without the piano are difficult. TJ knows that and graciously accommodated my habit. And with the piano set up, he and I could continue our cooking and music sessions for the better part of April.
The extra month after vacating my apartment has allowed me to tie up lose ends with finances and friends, and to take my time in figuring out how to ship my things back to my mom’s house. Pots, pans, winter coats, and concert clothes are good things to hang on to, but the shipment is really all about my piano. Shipping takes a long time, anywhere from two for four months. So the piano left this morning and it will get to New York many weeks after my arrival on May 1.  It’s an electric one, but a good one, a Yamaha Clavinova. I had it shipped here in 2017, and it will come with me wherever I go in the future.
 
I’m not sure if I’m the same person who moved to Dublin nearly four years ago. Maybe I am, or maybe I changed in some sort of fundamental way. Some things remain constant, though. I’ll be glad when my piano finally arrives in New York.