Saturday, October 27, 2007

Ahhhhhhhh............

The end of a very long day. Today I hauled the completed workings of a 1950's player piano (pianola to you Brit types) up the bulkhead stairs from the workshop, loaded it in my pick-up truck and drove to Marblehead, MA to install back in the customer's piano. Only a few minor glitches to solve that unfortunately required removing half the top action once and the total top action once.

It plays well.

The major, enormous nightmare that I forgot....

It's the weekend before Halloween and I had to drive directly through Salem, MA to get to and from the customer's house.

Salem...as in The Salem Witch Trials, Nathaniel Hawthorne and The House of Seven Gables, as in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. I had to drive directly past the Witch Museum, the Salem Commons where an enormous outdoor food arcade had been set up, and then rounded a corner at the waterfront to find a carnival. I counted 17 full size tour buses within 6 blocks. The sidewalks were as crowded as the mall the last shopping days before Christmas! Traffic was barely crawling. Needless to say, I should have brought my camera.

It felt good to see the sun heading for the horizon. I should sleep well tonight.

2 comments:

Claire said...

Lovely photo. Does Salem have a strange atmosphere because of it's history, like some really old churches have a good peaceful feeling about them, even if you're not religious?

deb said...

Thanks, it's actually a photo I took 32 years ago from the Moseley Estates of the Merrimack River. I'll be starting a series of posts about the Moseley Estates this winter.

I don't find Salem to have an unusual atmosphere. The witch stuff has been so commercialized that it takes away from the actual history. There are a few attempts to remind people of the past such as the Witch Museum, but that shares the spotlight with psychics and such. Architecturally Salem has wonderful examples of early Federalist sea captain's homes. And...the House of Seven Gables does exist. It is next door to Nathaniel Hawthorne's birthplace.

See:
www.salem.org and
www.hauntedhappenings.org