In the mid 1970s I was teaching in New Rochelle, New York, and when I was home with my family for Christmas break one year I went into Boston for a day, and as I headed back to the train I went into a musical instrument store on Boylston Street. The store had been there since to 19th Century and it was the one that many professional musicians frequented through the years.
What had enticed me to go in was a set of bagpipes I saw through the window that was in a display case. I always wanted a set of pipes and I was curious about the price.
It was a full set of Highland pipes with drones, mouthpiece, and chanter made of African ebony with real ivory trims and mounts, and an authentic suede bag covered with the tartan of the Black Watch, the Forty Twa.
I was surprised with the low price, but as the clerk explained, they had bought the set from a person who sold it to the store for a very low price to cure a financial problem, and pipes not being something they dealt with, they wanted to just move it along.
They allowed me to make a small down payment, and a week or two later I was able to get back to pay the balance.
I played various woodwind instruments among them the recorder, and it did not take long to see that the fingering was easy because of that.
Filling the bag and keeping it filled was the problem.
A fellow teacher in New Rochelle, who was also an auxiliary NYC police officer, introduced me to the officer who led the NYCPD Bagpipe contingent who solved that problem by telling me to fill the bag until the chanter had an erection, his language was quite colorful, and then just blow into the bag to keep it filled.
I had that set of pipes for about 15 years before they were taken by someone with discerning taste who had broken into my apartment in Long Beach, California also taking other objects that were not run of the mill fencible items.
Before that I had playfully used the pipes at a Christmas party or two, impromptu mini-parades accompanying people entering certain functions, once paddling a canoe to the middle of the lake near my house when I lived in a small town to play one tune before paddling back so no one would see me, and then hearing people at the Laundromat the next day talk about hearing pipes the night before, and driving my special Education students crazy by playing them one day in my class in Carson, California.
As I was untrained, I never did anything “official” with the pipes, but I had a set, and I played them for my enjoyment, official anything be damned.
Then they were gone.
After a pipeless 30 years, I saw a set of pipes for sale on the internet.
Again, someone was experiencing financial difficulty and the price was close to giving them away.
During the COVID-19 quarantining, as social gatherings were out, I kept putting aside whatever money I would have spent hanging out with friends at the bar on each day I would have done that, so that I could buy something for myself on my approaching landmark birthday.
To my surprise, in full honesty, it was quite an amount when looked at all together instead of a beer here and a drink or two there.
And I came upon the pipes.
Unlike the antique quality of my first set, these were Great Highland Bagpipes with rosewood drones, mouthpiece, and chanter with metal silver trims and mounts with a black velvet cover and matching cord, and the seller was throwing in a practice chanter that makes Erectile Dysfunction is a sexual ailment in which a man is unable to get and sustain an erection during sexual activity. levitra buy generic There were some studies go to web-site buy uk viagra which also proved that riding a bicycle also affects your love life. Cheap Kamagra as the cost of tadalafil best care- Over the past decade, the demand of the tablets at discounted prices. The solution of acupressure is not a pfizer viagra 100mg replacement for medications. it possible to play in my apartment without annoying the neighbors with what should only be played outdoors.
I will most likely rarely play them in public, if at all, but my dream of owning and then potentially replacing the stolen set has been realized.
And on the up side, in full disclosure, the price only put a dent in my bar savings.
And perhaps, if the imp in me possesses me enough to do it, I can use them for revenge.
At the beginning of last summer, a tenant moved into the apartment above me.
The previous tenants were aware of the constraints on apartment living enough to be rarely heard. Once in a while when they had friends over there were footfalls on my ceiling, but that was only occasional.
The new tenant has apparently never lived in an apartment before, and if he had, he was probably as bad a neighbor then as he is now.
He begins each morning jumping out of bed with a thud that shakes the ceiling fan in my bedroom and then, I assume, makes his bed which involves dragging the thing around the room, moving it rather than walking around it, unless he just likes to move his bed around.
He spends the next hour clomping from one room to another in a never ending procession often moving furniture on the hard wood floors, and, for some reason, dragging pieces of it from room to room. When he leaves for work, he slams the backdoor shut and then loudly plods down the back stairs.
When he returns, the clomping goes up the stairs, followed by a slamming of the backdoor and in apartment clomping and furniture movement. He seems to spend most of his time rearranging the living room furniture and this is often accompanied on a nightly basis of large objects falling to the floor, something that has woken me out of a deep sleep when he follows this practice after returning from a night with friends and the bars close.
Sometime he blesses me with more than one large thudding.
Both my landlord and the building’s maintenance man have been in my apartment when something heavy has been dropped, and I asked if, perhaps, my neighbor had some infirmity that causes him to fall to the floor occasionally which, it turns out, is not the case.
His interpretation of quarantine and social distancing seems to be that these apply to his going someplace, so he often has groups of people over who join in on the clomping and furniture moving as it is incessant until the last one clomps down the back stairs.
On more than one occasion, besides hanging pictures after midnight, he has seemed to be building something in his apartment that requires late night hammering, and on at least one occasion my neighbors have come to their backdoors because the volume of the late night hammering sounded like some construction was taking place on the shared back stairs.
Short of banging on my ceiling or the heating pipes, I have been at a loss as to some way to be equally annoying. I don‘t like confrontation especially if a request for some consideration can be met with a deliberate increase of annoying behavior,
Now, sitting on the top of my curio cabinet, I have my answer.
The pipes.
