I flew to Merrill to check my progress on the piano after one year.

Watching the Wisconsin River slide past to the sound of a woodpecker. Until I started recording audio, then he stopped pecking.

It has been roughly one year since my first trip to Merrill. I ended up here the first time by virtue of Merrill’s airport being one of thirty or so in the state that I hadn’t yet visited. As I sat at my desk trying to decide where that day would take me, Spotify threw a breadcrumb trail in front of me via one of my favorite pop songs of the 1980s. Included in the credits display was “George Merrill: Composer, Lyricist, Producer.”

“George Merrill.” Hey! Merrill is a town with an airport that I haven’t landed at. I’ll go to Merrill today.

I threw my bike in the back of the plane and flew to Merrill with the same goal I always have, to spend a day biking wherever and doing whatever. Find a place to grab a sandwich for lunch. Visit anything that stands out on Google Maps. Focus on bodies of water and go with the flow. Learn something along the way if possible.

When I arrived in Merrill I found another great small town Wisconsin airport. Facilities and grounds in good shape, nice newish terminal with a tasteful aviation-themed decor (according to me, a person with no taste whatsoever.) Also a piano in the corner of the room with a sign on it granting permission to play.

The Merrill airport piano as it stood on May 29th, 2024. It’s mostly unchanged a year later.

When I see a piano, like most people, I want to sit down and make it make nice sounds. But also like most people, at that time I had no idea how to make it make nice sounds. I’d fooled around with stuff like Heart and Soul and the first few chords of Stand by Me when I was a kid, but never as anything more than a kid playing around with a toy.

I considered sitting down and playing around with this toy, decades later, but one sentence among the signs arrayed across it caused me not to do so.

You are welcome to play this Baldwin Model M grand piano

We only ask that you respect the instrument

Thank you

“We only ask that you respect the instrument.”

For a kid to play around on a piano like it’s a toy is fine. It’s learning, it’s discovery, it might lead to something. For an adult, at least in this case, it is not fine. Doing so would not “respect the instrument.”

I left the piano alone that day and continued on my way. I ate lunch at The Grand Stand, biked along the Wisconsin River on the River Bend Trail, then headed to Council Grounds State Park and eventually doubled back to town for a cheeseburger at Ballyhoos. By the time I got back to the airport and blasted off for home, I’d put more than twenty miles on my ridiculous Citizen Rome folding bike–the most mileage it had ever seen in a single day.

The piano had little impact on my activites that day, but my mind kept wandering back to it afterward. I’d wanted to play the piano since I was maybe twelve years old but I’d never done anything about it. Maybe I should do something about it now. I can’t think of a better way to respect the instrument than to spend some time learning to play it and then go back and give it a shot.

Today, one year, one Roland FP-10 trainer piano, and hundreds of hours of learning later, I gave it a shot.

(If you’re as lacking in talent as I am, that’s what “hundreds of hours of learning” gets you.)

Had it not been for eight words on a sign, “we only ask that you respect the instrument,” I probably would’ve sat down at the piano a year ago and noodled around for a couple minutes and then never thought about it again. It wouldn’t have made me think about respect or learning to play or anything like that. Somebody chose to put a few extra words on a sign and it created a whole new side quest in my life.

I’ve gone back to Merrill to play the piano three times now. I intend to do so, at the very least, once a year for as long as I am able to fly an airplane and play a piano. In this first year I’ve gone back whenever I’ve learned a new piece of music or two, which has worked out to about once per season. I like that cadence, too.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in this life it’s that the key to learning or obtaining or accomplishing anything is to work with time rather than against it. Thirty minutes or an hour a day multiplied across all the days in a lifetime will eventually take you wherever you want to go.

Playing dress-up

After my last visit I decided that I was going to wear a tie whenever I play the Merrill piano, because part of being respectful is looking respectful. I’m no GQ model, I wasn’t born with those tools, but I decided to put my best foot forward.

The first time I’ve flown with a change of clothes in the back seat.

I like the idea of somebody watching the security camera footage, seeing a middle aged(++) man enter the building in a scuzzy t-shirt and blue jeans, disappear into the restroom to shortly re-emerge in cheap dress shirt and pants, play the piano at the level of an exceptionally gifted five year old for half an hour, then revert to t-shirt and jeans and pedal off on a clownish bicycle with tiny wheels.

“What the hell did I just watch?”

The shirt is too big, which only enhances the clownish image. I tend to buy them in sizes that fit me when I was fifty pounds heavier than I am now. I need to learn not to do that.

Dropping the gut was another thing time did for me once I learned to align myself with it.

Appendices

By : Matt Tags: