A Statue of Don Quixote on a Piano That Cannot Be Played
In which the narrative of our knight's mishap is continued
“Daddy, do you want to see my statue?”
“Your statue?”
“It’s this way.”
I follow my four-year-old son from the kitchen to the living room. We stop at the far wall where one of my painful obsessions is on full display. It’s an old piano.
I should not have tried to fix it. I should not have, but I did. I spent the better part of a year letting all of its curious little parts work their way into my dreams. I had been told by a professional not to bother. So, of course, I learned everything I could about pianos and piano maintenance.
It was going well for a while. Very well, actually. And then it wasn’t. And then it was again. And then it really wasn’t.
Old pianos are full to the brim with steep cliffs.
One day, I gave up. I left the old piano open and exposed. What kind of surgeon walks away in the middle of performing a surgery? If a thing is dead, one should at least have the decency to call the time of death and pull a sheet over it. But I just couldn’t any more. I couldn’t bear to look at it. For my own well being, I needed to pretend that the piano did not exist. I needed to walk away—avoid the living room altogether.
The piano is a stout little spinet. My son stands on his toes and reaches up to it's mantle-like lid. He grabs an old, wooden carving of Don Quixote. I’d placed the statue there myself, once upon a time, maybe a year and a half earlier, when I’d imagined that my days as a piano repair person must be very close to complete.
“Here,” he says.
He hands the statue to me. It’s dusty.
“Oh!” I say. “You’re right! This is a statue!”
As he hands it over, I ask him to be careful with it. I explain that it is old and fragile. I tell him that I broke it once myself.
“You see how the tip of the spear is kind of nubby? And how it’s a slightly different color than the rest of the wood? That’s because I wasn’t being careful with it. The tip of the spear used to go up maybe a whole inch higher.”
But my son is already walking back to the kitchen. I follow him with the statue in my hand.
“You know, this belonged to my daddy,” I say.
“Your daddy’s name is Brian,” he says.
“That’s true,” I say. “It was. It is. And someday this will be yours, I guess. If you want it.”
“What are cookies for?” he says.
This is a trap, but I know the way around.
“They’re a treat,” I say. “We usually have treats with lunch and dinner.”
“Can I have lunch?” he says.
“You can finish your breakfast,” I say, “and I’ll put a cookie in your lunchbox. You know, this is a character from a story.”
“Like Woody,” he says, “from Toy Story.”
“Like that,” I say. “Yeah, like Woody. But this character’s name is Don Quixote. The story is called Don Quixote too.”
“What happens?” he says.
And, just like that, at roughly 7:45 on a cold Thursday morning in February, I find myself in the predicament of having to explain Don Quixote to a four year old.
I decide to go for it. I speak slowly and carefully. There are some pregnant pauses, but it all comes out in a single breath:
Don Quixote is a man
Who sees all of the bad things in the world
And he wants to fix everything
Because he really cares about all of the good things
But he doesn’t always know what’s real
For a fleeting moment, I feel very proud of myself. Good summary, Dad. Then, almost immediately, I start to tear up. It’s really coming on strong—I can feel it.
I do what I can. I hide my face in the fridge while I get the food stuff to fill my son’s lunchbox. I face away from him while I slice an apple. Then I ask him to go get dressed for school. He does. It doesn’t seem as though he’s noticed the tears in my eyes.
I think it’s fine and good for boys to cry and to see their dads cry. I probably should have just let it happen to set a good example, but that’s not what I did. I found a way to get him out of the room. I did this partly because I wasn’t in the best head space to explain myself, but mostly because I really needed a good cry. I knew that if he stayed there in the kitchen that I wouldn’t be able to really lean into it. When I heard him stomping around in his room above the kitchen, I let go. I let it happen. I allowed myself a sustained, full-on, ugly cry.
I’m going to go ahead and say the quiet part out loud here:
I am a man
Who sees all of the bad things in the world
And wants to fix everything
Because I really care about all of the good things
But I don’t always know what’s real
My heart hurts. When did this happen? When did I become Don Quixote? Have I been Don Quixote the whole time?
The parallel is pretty devastating on its own—it’s given me some unpacking to do over the coming days and weeks—but it’s the statue’s connection to my dad that triggers the most haunting reverberations—that layers in so many colors of feeling and memory.
The statue itself is about a foot tall. It’s elegant and dignified but it’s also thin and frail—just the sort of attributes you’d hope to find in a statue of Don Quixote. It’s got a mid-century vibe. I imagine there are hundreds of thousands of wooden carvings just like it in thrift stores and storage lockers all around the world.
In 1989, Walt Disney’s Peter Pan was re-released in theaters. I went to see it with my family—all four of us, if I’m not mistaken, before my parents got separated. I was sitting next to my dad. We settled in as the movie began. It was safe and warm—it had long been established as something that we all loved. Then it got to the part where Wendy sings her lullaby to The Lost Boys.
I noticed that my dad was crying. Then I noticed that he was trying to hide that he was crying. I waited until later when it was just the two of us to ask him about it because I didn’t want to embarrass him.
“Why were you crying?” I said. “During the movie.”
“Oh,” he said.
He took a moment. In my memory, it was a very long moment. And then, when he spoke, he was brief.
“It was all that stuff about mothers,” he said.
I didn’t ask any follow-up questions. I just nodded. His mom—my grandma—had died in very recent memory. I was six. I remember feeling surprised (but not too surprised) that grownups still needed their parents so much—that they could feel so lost without them even though they were in charge of their own lives and in charge of the lives of their own children. It was a scary thought for a six year old. It must have been a scary thought for my dad too.
My dad died ten and a half years later when I had only recently turned seventeen—over winter break in the middle of my senior year of high school.
I don’t remember exactly how the statue wound up in my hands after that, but I can make a pretty well-informed guess.
I loved Man of La Mancha, the 1965 Broadway musical based on Don Quixote. It was a family favorite. My dad had the CD. It wasn’t unusual when I was a teenager to hear “Man of La Mancha (I, Don Quixote)” or “Dulcinea” echoing around the house. I knew all of the words to the songs—to the best of the songs anyway.
I think the transfer of the statue was just one of those things. I spotted it when we were emptying out his little apartment. “The Impossible Dream” began to play in my head and suddenly I needed the statue. No one else felt the need to claim it. From then on, it was mine.
I remember knocking it over when I was in my twenties. I remember the tight-necked realization that I’d broken the tip of the spear. I remember carving a new tip for the spear with my pocket knife. I remember going to the hardware store and trying to find a matching stain. These actions were all the exact kind of actions my dad would have taken if he’d broken an old wooden statue that had belonged to his father. I recognized that at the time—drew the parallels even then.
So I carried this thing around from ridiculous residence to ridiculous residence all throughout my chaotic twenties—through my mom’s death, through the best of my drinking, through the worst of my drinking. I kept it around in my much less chaotic thirties. Later still, in my first few years of fatherhood, I’d given it what I’d hoped would be a more permanent home on top of a piano that had found its way into my life—I gave it a home on top of what would turn out to be another one of my painful obsessions.
Am I a pitiable old man?
I didn’t read The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha until grad school when I was twenty seven. I was—and remain—blown away that it was written in 1605 and 1610 (its two original parts, respectively). There are people much more disciplined than I am who’ve written extensively about why it’s such a special book—why it’s so remarkable given its place in history. I’ll let you look into that as you see fit.
What I’ll say about it here—as a person who’s merely lived his whole life in the shadow of its imagery—is that I can almost guarantee you that your feelings about the hero will change over the course of your lifetime if you live long enough and if you decide to check in with the old man every decade or so. It’s a remarkable thing that Cervantes does. He materializes exactly the right kind of folly and then he blends it into exactly the right kind of righteous indignation such that the two become indistinguishable—the combined gravity of which we will continually underestimate in new and exciting ways as we age.
Until one day it lands on top of us.
When I was young, I cheered for Don Quixote without exception. I didn’t mind that he was nuts—I liked his style. I admired his steadfastness. Frankly, I liked that he was nuts. Knowing the story of Don Quixote made me nod and smile when I met people out in the real world who were nuts in the same way. It made me feel a little better about the ways that I was nuts.
Now, crying here in the kitchen, holding this old statue, I feel a deep pity for Don Quixote. I feel a deep pity for my dad. I feel a deep pity for myself. I mourn the loss of my certainty—my certainty, which I hadn’t really appreciated for its tireless efforts over the years, for the way that it had anchored my sense of self and my sense of self worth to whatever it is that those things are anchored to.
Not everyone is Don Quixote. Not everyone becomes Don Quixote. I’ve known my fair share of people who simply spent some time being old before they died. I can confidently say that many of them never got around to tilting at windmills—not even once. This is foreign to me, but I think I can understand it. This kind of adventure is not for the faint of heart.
For some of us though, at some point in our lives, this kind of adventure begins to feel obvious. We realize that it has always been with us and will always be with us. It is obvious to us that there are giants that need slaying. That there are wrongs that need righting. That the world is a place that’s in dire need of chivalry (granted, a more contemporary, less-gendered form of chivalry than Don Quixote would have been accustomed to).
The harrowing part is that over time it also dawns on us that our wherewithal will eventually, inevitably fade. It is obvious to us that maybe it’s been fading for a while now—perhaps for longer than we’d realized. It is obvious to us that stubbornly, madly, our righteous indignation refuses to fade. That it may grow. And then what are we to do?
While my son is still busy getting dressed, stomping around in his room above the kitchen, I wipe my eyes. I walk back to the living room. I put the statue back on top of the piano—the piano, which, I remember, cannot be played. I feel the sorrow of this in my chest. It literally hurts. I lose all of the air in me.
It’s getting dark now. And I’m afraid. Are you still here, Sancho? Are you with me?
I stand there looking at the statue on the piano for a moment or two. Until the pity begins to subside. Until, slowly, something familiar begins to pour into the empty spaces that self pity leaves behind. And I begin—again—to feel certain that I am the wind—that I am ancient. And even on the stillest of days, what can the wind do but find cause to move again?
Wow! What a moving story. Your son is lucky to have such a thoughtful, engaged father.