Albert Schweitzer's piano....................

     "I have no intention of dying." he once told his staff, "so long as I can do things. And if I do things, there is no need to die.  So I will live a long, long time."
     And he did - until he was ninety-five.
     Like his friend Pablo Casals, Albert Schweitzer would not allow a single day to pass without playing Bach.  His favorite piece was the Toccata and Fugue in D. Minor.  The piece was written for the organ,  But there were no organs in Lambarene.  There were two pianos, both uprights, both ancient.  The one in the staff dining room was the more battered of the two.  The equatorial climate, with its saturating humidity, had vanquished it almost beyond recognition.  Some of the keys had no ivories; others were yellowed and cracked.  The felt on the hammers had worn thin and produced harsh, twanging sounds.  The instrument had not been tuned in years; even if it had been, the improvement would have been short lived.  On my first visit to the hospital, I wandered into the dining room, sat down to play, then drew back abruptly at the caricatured tones.  Yet the amazing thing was that Schweitzer could play hymns on it at dinner each evening and the piano somehow lost its poverty in his hands.
-as excepted from Norman Cousin's Anatomy of an Illness