Being a semiserious student meant I had to play some Bach and Beethoven too-earlier, sparer, more naked music than the romantics, and for this reason, less forgiving of weak points in technique. I loved the puzzle of a new piece, noticing how some composers’ ideas (mostly the Russian romantics-Scriabin, Rachmaninoff) felt almost preprogrammed in my brain, so intuitive were both the sounds and the physical movements that made them-while others posed a baffling and charmless blockade. Then there was the 6-foot-11-inch Steinway Model B in my piano teacher’s living room, where a handsome fire purred all winter and she sat incurably glamorous, welded to her coffee mug, an assassin at the keyboard. These were families I knew from our Mormon church, where I would go on school-day afternoons to practice when my mom was teaching at home-as ward organist, she had the keys. I grew up in Salt Lake City, a place with a lot of pianos: the flinty hand-me-down upright in my mother’s dining room, on which she taught my first six years of lessons the five- or six-foot grands in the living rooms of some of our neighbors, whose kids I would babysit for spending money and so I could tinker away after they went to bed. When I sat down and played, even before the tuner had come to settle those jostled strings, I understood at once that it was the right choice: A grand piano-sweet sounding, sensitive keyed, screen free, and utterly indifferent to the quality of your Wi-Fi-has made my life a warmer, lovelier, better-ballasted thing.

I’m the guy-the guy who saw fit to spirit a 600-pound piano onto the vinyl-tile living-room floor of his railroad apartment next to a cement factory.

Some 90 minutes in, as I peeked out from my kitchen entryway onto the landing one floor below, one of the giants caught sight of me: “Oh. If these stairs give out, I thought-not a distant possibility- I’ll have blood on my hands.

At eight o’clock one Saturday morning, six giants appeared in front of the building where I live, propped open the front door, and started heaving a thickly swaddled 1930 Steinway Model L grand piano up the narrow switchbacks to the fourth floor. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.

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