“They were all wearing their nice Christmas clothing...”

Piano tuner Ron Kroenke tells his friend Shannon O'Donnell about tuning a piano at a nursing home.

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Recorded in Omaha, NE

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RK: A group gathered around in chairs and they were all wearing their nice Christmas clothing and I thought, 'Well, how nice. You know, they have no idea that I'm going to bore them to sleep with my tuning.'

And I'm kind of working along happily and I'm smiling at people and a few of them were looking at me like, 'What in the world is he doing?' One lady was just glaring at me. Another lady was giving me sympathetic looks. Her name turned out to be Rose. And then the activity director comes in and says, 'Ok everybody, Mrs. Jennifer was here and she saw that the piano man was tuning the piano so she'll be back in January.'

I didn't realize they had a concert scheduled that day. About a third of the people looked highly disappointed. And they were murmuring to each other, trying to tell each other what had happened. An angry lady barked at me and said, you know, 'Haven't you ever heard -- If it isn't broke don't fix it.' And she stormed off.

I had scooted over on my seat out of the view of Rose because she looked so hurt. And suddenly she touched my arm and it startled me and I looked and she was very close to me and she told me very sincerely, 'I've been sitting here the whole time and I've been watching what you do and I can tell that you're the kind of person who would never walk away from this piano until everything was just so.'

That was a moment where someone did just the right thing just out of the blue. And it did mean something to me.