I unwrapped that old sheet-music page right there on my piano bench, and I had to sit down, because folded inside was a page of handwritten music and a note, and the tune had my name in the title.
The handwritten music was a waltz, and across the top, in careful pencil, it said: For Earl and the girl he asked to marry, 1958.
The piano player for that dance hall band, a man named Roy who sat at those keys for near fifty years, had written it. I remembered Roy. Everybody did. He played every Saturday of my young life.
Roy sat at that piano and watched this whole county court and marry and grow old across the dance floor in front of him, and when something special happened out there, a proposal, a first dance, a reunion, he would go home and write a little tune for it, and tuck the page inside the piano, so the instrument itself would carry the memory of the night.
His note said that a band leader sees more love in one Saturday than most folks see in a year, and that he could not bear to let all those nights disappear when the hall closed. He wrote that the night my Earl walked me across that floor and asked me to marry him, he had watched the whole thing from the bench, and he went home and wrote us a waltz, and that if the piano ever came to one of us, we should have our song at last.
Earl and I had forty-four years. I never knew a man at a piano had turned the best night of my life into music and hidden it away for me.
Roy is gone now. But I took his handwritten waltz to my granddaughter, who plays beautifully, and I sat in my parlor, and she played the song a man wrote for Earl and me sixty-six years ago, the one that had waited inside a piano all this time.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. My Earl asking me to marry him, turned into a waltz by a kind man at a piano, played at last in my own front room.
I bought back the old dance-hall piano because it had not been tuned in years. It gave me back my wedding proposal as music, written and hidden by a band player who spent his life watching this county fall in love and refusing to let a single good night be forgotten.