The Lady or the Tiger

I seem to be caught up in decision making these days. Yesterday I obsessed on which path to take while hiking. Today much of my mental energy has been used on making a shopping decision. Psychologists love to talk about decision making. When I was a psychology student, we considered what made a decision easy to make and what made one hard to make. If the choices are trivial (such as whether to choose an apple or an orange to eat), then the decision should be easy. If the choices have life-long consequences (such as whether or not to have an abortion), then the decision should be hard to make. However, I have found that some major decisions have been quite easy. It was easy for me to decide to marry Larry, have two children, buy a Prius, and to buy a house in Tucson, for example. It was hard to choose which college to go to, which house in Bellevue to buy, and which grand piano to buy. More recently, it was hard for me to decide when we should leave for Tucson. I have to miss an important ASG annual meeting to leave when we did, and I miss being with my friends then. The alternative was giving up 2 weeks of vacation. Purchase of a sewing machine and computer were medium hard for me. I’m sure that son Cliff would have some explanations to share with me about shopping and brain activity, which is now the hot subject of researchers. At any rate, I have started shopping for a used piano in a low budget price range and am going through emotional ups and downs. I saw 3 today. The first would have been great—new looking, shiny black, and pretty good sound. However, someone else beat me to it. The second one I saw was recommended by a piano technician. It was in fairly good shape, but the color of wood was too light for our great room and the sound was too bright for my tastes. The last one I saw was a reputable brand, but was almost as old as I am, hadn’t been tuned in 13 years, and was dusty.

I need to be patient and keep looking. It’s hard to do that in these days of amazon.com and eBay, where you can find about anything instantly. It’s a journey to find a piano. I keep thinking of what my cousin Joanne told me when Larry and I started out in our first house. She said to buy quality things the first time around because you’ll never know how long you’ll be stuck with furniture you get. She always then refers to her bedroom set. I’ve been hearing about that for over 30 years! I don’t want my next piano to be my equivalent of her bedroom furniture.