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how I play a piano
Sunday, July 12 2026
location: room 115, M.S. Monet in Crotone, Italy
I was feeling well enough this morning to go to breakfast. I still had a nascent issue in my throat, like someone had kept it packed with cotton for a time, but there wasn't much if any mucous and no soreness.
Meanwhile Gretchen had found out more about the way our new friends, the veterinarians from Brighton, were traveling. It seems that at most of the places we docked along the cruise, Mary had pre-arranged private tours of various places. These tours generally involved being picked up by a driver in a Mercedes and getting detailed information from a guide. There would also usually be some amazing meal, perhaps served by some local family beneath a canopy overlooking a coastal vinyard. It was a completely different grade of tourism than what the cruise ship itself offered, though of course they also had a third-floor cabin which, unlike our first floor one, featured a wall of big glass windows to look out of and a sitting area somewhat separate from the sleeping area. (These windows are so big that passive solar heating often made their cabin uninhabitable by the time they returned from a day's outing.)
Today Dave didn't want to go on the day's private tour, so Mary offered Gretchen the slot. (She also offered me a previously-nonexistent third slot, but none of that sounded like a good time to me, especially after being a tourist while sick yesteday.) Gretchen, of course, jumped at the chance to experience tourism the way the wealthy do, and so she and Mary were off doing whatever they were doing all morning. Gretchen would later tell me that it somehow involved two support cars this time, as the car the guide was traveling in was evidently deemed substandard for chauffeuring the echelon of guest this tourism company catered to. As for the details of what was seen, it wasn't interesting enough for me to remember.
Indeed, the only second-hand tourism that proved memorable was a story told by Kelly about what that round woman back in Lecce had said when giving a second tour that afternoon (as I lay convalescing). I think the tour that time had been of Otranto itself and the story concerned an invasion by the Ottomans in the late 1400s. The first thing the Ottomans had done was kill all the men and boys older than 15 and then taken everyone else as slaves. A few locals managed to esape to the cathedral, which the Ottomans then besieged. The survivors then tried to pay money so that they could survive, an offer the Ottomans refused. All that the Ottomans would accept was their conversion to Islam. As good Catholics, though, the besieged said they'd rather be killed "in the most gruesome manner imaginable" than do that. So when when the Ottomans eventually broke into the cathedral, grabbed the besieged, marched them to a hill above town (not that there are any hills in this part of Italy) and sliced off all their heads.
The cappuccino machines on this particular boat were consumer-grade models, much like the one on the Caribbean sail boat back in February. There were two of them this time, though only one of them had an attachment allowing it to make drinks containing oat milk. They also somehow work even less quickly and reliably than the Caribbean cappuccino machine. It seems they're always complaining about needing things added or emptied, much like an unloved baby one might like to strangle in its crib. The user interfaces are also confusing, with it not being clear one buttons one presses to alter the drink to be made and what buttons one presses to actually make the drink. All that is to say that the cappuccino machine has not been as fun as it has been on other cruises, so I have been drinking a lot more tea and not all that many cappuccinos. When I do make cappuccinos, though, I find myself being at the coffee station long enough to end up in small talk with others on the cruise. One of those people today was Dave, the veterinarian who had decided to opt out of the fancy tourist experience, opening up a slot for Gretchen. He asked what I was up to today, and I said I'd just be doing on deck but that I might go ashore at some point to check out Crotone, the city we were docked at (on the sole of the boot of Italy). I said that just as a way of adding something concrete to chit chat; I didn't really mean this to say what I would definitely be doing. But then Dave wanted to know what time I would be doing it. I said maybe around eleven, just making shit up. But then he acted as though this was a hard and fast thing in my calendar and he'd be meeting me near the front desk to maybe go into Crotone with me. I didn't know how to tell him I wanted to make no such plans; instead I just agreed and now suddenly I had something I had to do at eleven that had been conjured out of nothing and my glorious alone time would be ending soon.
By 11:00am, though, I really was tired of being on the ship and noodling around with my laptop. So I walked out to the main desk to look for Dave. He wasn't there, so perhaps he hadn't taken our date to be as real as it had seemed in my mind. So I wandered off the boat by myself. As I was walking through the security checkpoint, Kelly and Brian caught up with me, and now I had to walk around Crotone with them. I was a little disappointed not be checking the place out by myself. But they're fun companions and their lack of stamina insured we wouldn't be venturing too far into Crotone. We waded through a bustling outdoor market where vendors sold things like vegetables and deeply discounted underwear. Then we rounded a semi-crumbing fort, passed through some sort of archeological restoration of said fort, and then climbed up to an entrance where it cost money to enter. At that point we went back down the hill back toward the boat. Along the way, we passed a Tesla, and this reminded Kelly and Brian that Dirk, the guy who owns the vegan cruise company, had recently bought a Tesla and that it had quickly been defaced by one of Elon Musk's many German detractors.
This afternoon as our boat motored off towards the Strait of Messina, Gretchen and I watched the first episode of the first season of a premium television series called Dark Winds that is set in Navajo country back in the early 1970s. The main reason I was interested in it was that it was produced by not just Robert Redford but also George R. R. Martin, and I've become a fan of Martin's television productions if not his books. The first episode started with a helicopter bank heist, and who doesn't want to see what happens after that? But the show is really more in Gretchen's wheelhouse than mine: it's sort of a rustic crime procedural wrapped around a set of mysteries. It's very sensitive to the fair portrayal of Navajos, but it's also embued with just enough supernatural details to cause me mild irritation. I found the first episode watchable, but only barely. Gretchen, though, wouldn't stop talking about how premium it was and how much she loved it.
[REDACTED]
This afternoon, I finally put enough work into following the chain of clues that Mary had been leaving about my purloined hot sauce to actually retrieve it. The hot sauce had ended up behind the ships bar among the top-shelf drinks, and the entire staff of the boat seemed to be colluding with Mary on ruse. Along the way, I'd had to track down clues in ship's tiny library, in a collection of books that only staff have access to (but that I snuck into), and in the ship's piano (a device that looks like a tiny grand but is actually entirely electronic). Today while Gretchen and Mary had been out enjoying their high-end tourism, Mary had taken pictures of the bottle of hot sauce in various rustic scenes and then used digital technology to add googly eyes.
Our ship has too small of a crew to include a musician, so the electronic piano in the lounge has mostly sat fallow for this cruise. Today might've been the day when I sat behind it and played a little improvization on the white keys while holding the sustain pedal down. Based initially on Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," and always in the key of C major, it can sound very nice and as if I know how to play a piano. But I'm just doing the safest possible thing one can do with a piano keyboard. Nevertheless, Kelly and Brian heard me playing and were suddenly struck with an inferiority complex that I had this "skill" that they had no idea about in addition to all my other apparent skills. People have been reacting to my piano style this way for over thirty years, since I first developed how I play on the many fine pianos at Oberlin College. But it's just a parlor trick.
Kelly and Brian wanted to play cards, and Gretchen agreed to do so, but I didn't want to play. So I sat out while they played some game involving a conventional 52 card deck. Early in the game, Brian introduced a separate game that was extremely simple and had no real rules. All we had to do was go around in a circle with each of us naming a song that mentions "rain." My first offering was Slayer's "Raining Blood," which was unfamiliar to the others. It's not really a singable song, but I do know how to play its chromatic riff on a piano, so I did just that. Another of my offerings was "Purple Rain." Other songs mentioned include "Rainy Days and Mondays," and "Rain in the Summertime."
This evening, Kelly, Brian, Gretchen, and I sat with the veterinarians Mary and Dave and a nice couple from the deep south, one of whom teaches computer programming. Some sort of vegan wellington was served, and, if it was anything like the other food on this boat, it was quite good.
Later, back in our cabin, Gretchen and I watched a second episode of Dark Winds as well as an episode of Jeopardy!. My laptop has three terabytes of SSD storage, so there is no reason not to carry an enormous video library everywhere we go.
Kelly and Brian with the Crotone castle (or fort) in the background. Click to enlarge.
Something is crumbling on the Crotone castle. Click to enlarge.
A small church in Crotone. Click to enlarge.
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