pianos from heaven

It’s not every day something falls out of the sky, least of all a piano. We’re just on the edge of the season to be jolly, fa la la; but this is almost as good as if Albert the Alligator had risen from the dead to give us one more round of Boston Charlie.

There it sits in the middle of the woods, a light wintry dusting on the ground around it and a keystone cop struggling to make sense of it — human interest 2008. I don’t see any sequins on the policeman’s uniform, but we’re told the Harwich gendarmerie have entitled this photo, “Liberace.” Ah, creativity. . . . it droppeth as the gentle snow.

Indeed, it’s almost as though, in this season of dearth and stringency, some god with a sense of humor had decided to favor the folks in Harwich, MA, with a pick-me-up, though I suspect human agency — perhaps some high-school students with no more serious trouble to get into than attempting harmlessly to cheer up their fellow citizens. Here’s a bit of what the very clever folks at CNN have to say about the whole thing.

Discovered by a woman who was walking a trail, the Baldwin Acrosonic piano, model number 987, is intact — and, apparently, in tune.

Sgt. Adam Hutton of the Harwich Police Department said information has been broadcast to all the other police departments in the Cape Cod area in hopes of drumming up a clue, however minor it may be.

But so far, the investigation is flat.

Also of note: Near the mystery piano — serial number 733746 — was a bench, positioned as though someone was about to play.

The ever vigilant Harwich police, who note that they will not be “holding a holiday party in the storage bay” to which they have banished the offending instrument — no self respecting piano should presume to show itself in the woods around Cape Cod after all — have observed with great solemnity that “it took a handful of police to move the piano into a vehicle to transport it to storage, so it would appear that putting it into the woods took more than one person.”

O tempora o mores!