I'm a piano snob. I readily admit it. In fact, I'm sort of proud of it.

Or perhaps a slightly more accurate yet offensive way of putting it is: I'm a piano racist.

I don't like upright pianos. I like grand pianos. I'm prejudiced. I think the best upright piano in the world probably isn't quite as good as the worst grand piano in the world. (Okay, assuming the worst grand piano in the world is at least in working order.)

The sound in grand pianos is obviously better. They have a larger resonating chamber, longer strings, and can open up to the room easier. There's a reason why you never see anyone playing a piano concerto in a concert hall on an upright, and it's not the fact that grands also look way cooler. Some people (I won't mention any names, but one of them lives with me) claim to not be able to really tell the difference between the sound of an upright and the sound of a grand. But I submit that's merely because they've never really stopped to notice.

And another thing. When you're playing an upright, you don't feel like you can give it all you've got. Uprights feel fragile, and when I play them, I'm always afraid I'll break them if I play with any energy at all. (Of course, this is an odd point for me to make, since I have never actually broken anything on an upright piano, yet I have broken strings on at least two, maybe three, grands in my time, because I was playing with too much energy--maybe I need to restrain myself at least a little when playing a grand. Or maybe that's just because I usually refuse to play uprights, so my chances of breaking one are small.)

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have played the piano since I was very small, and I love to do it. My piano skills of late have somewhat deteriorated (specifically, since I moved East), because I simply haven't had a piano to practice on. Pianos (even uprights) are expensive, you know. I've been looking forward for a long time to the day when I would own my own house, and have enough space for a piano. And that longing has always been accompanied by a surety that a rinky-dink upright piano will never set foot in my house. For me, it's always been grand or bust.

Why do I tell you all this? Well, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea when they walk into my living room and see an upright piano sitting there. Mind you, I'm grateful for the upright piano sitting in my living room. It just arrived last night, and I haven't even really had a chance to play it (it really needs tuning--and not just because it's an upright), but I'm very happy it's there. It belongs to a couple we recently met in church who owns it, but doesn't have room for it in their apartment. The previous caretaker of their piano is moving away this week, so we are now responsible for storing our friends' piano till they get a bigger place (reportedly planned to happen in January). It's old, not overwhelmingly pretty, and outrageously heavy (four burly guys (including me) were just barely able to lift it over our front door threshold last night).

I'm still a piano snob, but I like our upright, and I'm glad to have it. I'm glad it's temporary--when it leaves, we'll get a grand. In the meantime, I'm going to break out my old piano books and start re-learning the stuff I learned in high school and early college. It won't sound fantastic on this instrument, but even I, the piano snob, admit that the tinny sound of an upright is usually better than silence.