Recessions aren’t all bad. My daughter, Annie, who a few years ago felt she had been priced out of the housing market in our area, finds herself priced right back in with the market value of homes plunging. And my wife, Lenie, who has been the volunteer accompanist for the Gold Beach High School and grammar school choirs for the past two years, has discovered that the price of used baby grand pianos has fallen to the point where she can afford to buy one.

Lenie has been practicing on her small spinet upright, which has been in her family since she was eight years old. It’s a good piano, but she really coveted a baby grand for its more luxurious sound. Thanks to the efforts of Dorothy Ainsworth, one of BHM’s key writers, and her son, Eric, an accomplished pianist, we located a 25-year-old baby grand Yamaha at the Piano Studios and Showcase in Medford, Oregon. Eric played every piano in the store to determine the Yamaha was a good buy, roughly half the cost of what it would sell for prior to the recession.

Tom Lowell, the store’s owner and a writer on the side, clinched the deal when he offered to write BHM an article about how he built a road into his homestead. I find it difficult to pass up a good story on a useful topic. Eric borrowed Tom’s truck and moved the baby grand the 150 miles to our home near Gold Beach yesterday.

Lenie played the whole evening.

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