Things I Love About Texas
It was a cool evening in Lampasas, Texas. We were coming home from the Dairy Queen, a dinner out. East bound on the main drag through town, we fell in behind an old pick up with an old upright piano in the back. It prompted me to think about a couple years earlier in Mannheim when some friends needed a piano moved from the fourth floor of one stairwell apartment to the third floor of another stairwell...it was an adventure but that is another story. That is what I was thinking about as we neared the traffic circle at the top of the hill, just before the drive-in theater. We had to go around to the north onto the hiway that went to Killeen, but only for a couple of blocks to get to the little shack we lived in. As the pick up entered the circle, the piano began to tip. MamaCharlie and I both gasped at the same time. It was like a slow motion film...the piano leaned, bumped the side, then just sort of summersaulted over and landed on it's top on the road. Then it sort of flexed over into a parallelagram...and pieces of it started to fall off. The truck stopped and two skinny, Texas-types, you know...Levis, snapped shirts, boots and hats, hopped out with the most mortified looks I have ever seen. We stopped to see if we could help...not that much could be done for the piano. Then, as if a spell was suddenly broken, the one who wasn't driving broke into uproarious laughter. The other looked embarassed and said it wasn't funny. The laugher regained his breath and said something like, "She ain't never gonna believe you..." It took a few minutes but the story came out. The piano belonged to the driver's ex-wife. She had been bugging to get it back for a while and he finally decided to take it back to her to get her off his back. He never did see the humor in it while I helped get it back in the truck...I'm pretty sure the ex-wife didn't either.
Just for the purist...a couple of years ago MamaCharlie and I went to Ft Hood to visit HBW and LH and the little guy...the little gal not around yet. We went a visited the little shack we had lived in and were surprised to find it there despite all the changes that had taken place. One of the bigh changes we saw was the drive-in theater was gone...so was the traffic circle. Imagine, things changed in just 30 years.