August 2009
Good year to all our family and friends. Photos of every linked
item will open if you
click on the highlighted text, so you can enjoy a virtual tour of our
local hang-outs:
Here we are. At home. In August. We should be in the North
Channel by now, or on the Trent Severn Canal system somewhere, but as
the time approached, we simply "lost the will to leave", so to
speak. Early in the spring we bought a trailerable sailboat
called Tiger Moth, and a
GMC Sierra Hybrid to pull it;
but after a July highlighted by family visitors, including my parents Tom and Kathleen (here with my
cousin Tom on his
staircase, his father Tom and his mother Janice, my mother's sister, on
the top step - three Toms in close proximity, we could have played the
drums),
and my sister Dianne, brother-in-law Kris
and their new daughter Miranda,
we began to consider a confluence of
reasons to stay home. We'd been to Niagara
Falls twice in July, and to our own local Rosetta McClain Gardens
twice.
It rained every other day (and do we want to be camping on a sailboat
in the rain?), but it was also very sunny, cool, green and beautiful
right here in Toronto when it wasn't raining, and our garden was
entering the harvest phase...so after a June of strawberries, we're
entering an August of zuchinni, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers,
raspberries, and squash, plus many herbs and flowers. In the
photo you can see a variety of types of tomatoes we've been eating,
including sweet cherry tomatoes and the odd-looking but most delicious
of all, the Russian Krim, with the green tops.
The
temperature has been astonishingly comfortable for land-lubbers -
averaging 25 degree daily highs, with only one 30 degree day all summer
so far. We have
friends to visit, especially those who also have the summer off, and we
don't get to see much through the winter; we have tennis courts (I'm
struggling with a weakened ankle right now, but I love to play), and
sailing; I have my musical pursuits, described in a postscript, below;
and we have another excuse not to leave - most of what we'd
look for on a vacation
exists right here with no effort to get to them. Let me explain,
only slightly tongue-in-cheek:
Our modest home-that-looks-like-a-cottage
is a
fairly trouble-free place to
hang out, with a good shed and a fine garden,
including a relaxing
patio table and chairs in a private back yard. The house that
backs onto our property has been silently and peacefully vacant for a
decade, as
bizarre as that seems. We eat Deborah's good cooking, watch
new movies every night on the living room wall, and we're gradually
getting
rid of stuff we've collected over the years by advertising it all on
Craigslist and Kijiji - and that process takes being around to answer
phone
calls and emails, and arrange appointments for people to come and see,
and hopefully buy, the items they're interested in.
When we need a change of scene,
we drive for
five minutes to our
lakefront
cottage-that-looks-like-a-home - now this
is, admittedly, a shared
facility (and therefore very inexpensive for us, although the city is
trying to tax us as a $5 million property), but it isn't a time share;
we can be there year-round, twenty-four hours a day, and most of the
others that we share this facility with just aren't there or spend most
of their time on their boats, so we never feel crowded; but at the same
time, we have a dock community of
acquaintances to share a story and a laugh with whenever we're in the
mood for that. It's a great recreation model. Our "cottage"
has various rooms, like the Sailor's
Lounge, a great kitchen, showers, a Great Room where the community
gathers to play darts and euchre on Wednesday evening and they open the
bar - and the drinks are less than half of the cost in a
restaurant. There's a downstair deck
with umbrella tables and
chairs, and a wrap-around balcony deck on the second floor, as
well as lovely corners to retire to everywhere, like the huge weeping
willow trees out on the point. There's a two
story workshop for everyone's use, a huge parking lot for our
guests who come for a visit, a BBQ or a sail, gardens, picnic tables
and BBQ's everywhere including right
in front of our boat. Speaking of which, where is our bedroom
in our "cottage"? Why, right here,
of course. And
we share an island (across a bridge and behind a locked gate) with
three
other clubs at which we have reciprocal privileges, one with a terrific
restaurant with a view, and another where we store the trailerable
boat, and good friends at the third, including some musical
friends. We're connected to a large park, a commercial marina
nearby, and on the other side a great supervised swim beach and trails
out along a wooded peninsula to a lighthouse (the trees are being
thinned out somewhat by the denizens of a local beaver lodge, mind
you). It's really like an Ontario
lakefront resort, and it's all ours, minutes from the door of our house.
So, here we remain, having turned back at the doorstep of a summer
adventure. Is it a case of age and hormonal decrease...or as Dad
said about things he doesn't feel like doing anymore, "Been there, done
that..."? (or is this just another case of the chicken or the
egg?) I think it might also be that we know we will soon be
able to travel wherever we want and for as long as we please, since
we're planning to retire at Christmas of this year. And because
we want to be free to travel, it feels important to deal with reducing
our possessions and making sure we complete our summer home maintenance
projects. Maybe it
is a combination of all the above, as well as my painful ankle ligament
which is healing over several months. Whatever it is, we're
blissfully content to let the days flow by without going anywhere at
all, for now.
Kitty Lemieux finally died of an
unspecified age-related illness at the
beginning of the summer, so we have no more pets to worry about, except
for
the semi-feral Siamese cat who I call Jasmine
that had her kittens in our
furnace room and who is now in no hurry to leave her lovely, safe new
home. We've
moved her food gradually out the door and up the stairs toward the
kitchen, a little further each day, to encourage her to expand her
horizons, and maybe one day soon she'll slip out the back door and only
return for grub. She prefers to remain out of sight, although
she'll come upstairs to us to be hand-fed and petted twice a day.
Right now she is my
nervous metaphor...I feel I must be like her to a distressing degree,
no longer willing to leave the comfort of my home and neighbourhood now
that the summer is finally here, even though I looked forward to the
opportunity while I was at work and couldn't go anywhere. Or
maybe I just realized that my cup is more than half full right here and
right now, and there's no need to go somewhere else to try to fill it
up. It's the good life...
I hope you are all having adventures and blissful summer days.
Deborah and I love to hear from you all whenever we can, and we love to
host visits from friends and family.
Yours truly,
Stephen and Deborah
P.S. My musical life, a
mini-essay:
I played
music all summer with a variety of people and instruments, and the
emphasis was on "play" and on friendships. I worked with a four
piece band called Night
Flyte, which has a decades-long history of playing gigs in
Toronto. The guitarist and
lead singer John Hope was resurrecting the band after two years of
dormancy. It was good
to play again with someone who can "hit the ground running",
competently performing a wide range of songs without a year of
rehearsal preceding gigs. I had plenty of time to help him
develop his "book" with the new group through the summer, but I bowed
out when I got busy at work again in the fall, and realized I would
likely be travelling during the winter when
he hoped to be busiest. He needed to find players who'd be around
and were hungry enough to want to give up weekend evenings in the cold
winter driving to modestly paid gigs, lugging heavy equipment, etc,
while I needed more variety, spontaneity and "fun" in my
music-making.
I played various kinds
of music
with various other combinations of people all summer, including
jazz with trombone
and sax players; a jamming group of guitars, bass, drums and keyboard;
a
finger-picking guitarist and slide guitarist duo for which I worked on
blending in muted trumpet parts; and two friends who formed a fiddle,
mandolin
and
keyboard combo. My guiding focus in this pursuit has been
friendship
first, musicianship second. As men age, the camaraderie they had
in sports fades as their athleticism declines; playing music is one
group activity which can replace my lifetime sequence of sports: rugby,
soccer, cricket,
softball, volleyball and finally tennis, curling, ping-pong and racing
sailboats (progressively
less physically punishing sports!); and when you
retire, the
friendship of your still-working colleagues largely evaporates.
Something has to replace all of that, so when it comes to playing
music, friendship and sincerity are more important to me nowadays than
money
from gigging, or the embarrassing delusion of recapturing a lost
youthful dream of local rock stardom, which is a disease that seems to
infect too many musicians of my vintage who are coming back out of the
woodwork as the importance of sports and career-building recede.
Right now I'm enjoying the release from deafening (literally!) volumes
in small rooms at rehearsals, and slavish adherence to trying to sound
like each hit recording, as if those songs could never be played in
other way, even though a small amateur group just doesn't have the same
level of technology, talent and instrumentation; and with no room for
creative expression that allows the unique musicianship of each member
of the group to emerge. When creativity is allowed to happen,
sparkling moments of pure musical magic, of creative collaboration,
spontaneously fill the air. Mind you, it takes a certain
foundation of experience and musicianship for those moments to spring
from - it isn't common for amateur musicians of limited training and
performance experience to have the talent that those improvizational
musical connections are grounded in, but it starts to emerge when
musicians are open to the concept, at least. When it happens,
it's a genuinely playful and joyful "peak experience", a natural
high. A background that includes singing, especially harmonies,
and jazz studies, in addition to rudimentary and classical music
lessons on your instrument, and listening to top forty hits and pop
groups all your life, is most likely to provide the fertile ground for
those acoustic flowerings.
For the fall, I considered
rejoining the concert band, but ended up
being invited into the Scarborough Teachers' Choir, who were short of
male singers, particularly tenors. It's a bit painful for me to
sing in
the higher tenor range, but I agreed to help them out, especially when
I realized that this is a musical pursuit that Deborah could enjoy
doing with me. She's singing alto in the choir, and thoroughly
enjoying the challenge. There's a once a week teacher's pop band at my
school, and pick-up rock group at my yacht club (we have a six channel
mixer and speakers built right into the clubhouse). Looking
beyond, I have a
music contact on cruise ships who provided me with a repertoire list to
work toward playing keyboard and trumpet in a cruise ship orchestra,
which is one of the items on my bucket list.
In some of the groups of
musicians I play with now, I am the keyboard
bass player in addition to being the trumpet, harmonica and
synthesizer
keyboard player, and relief singer plus harmony back-up singer. It's
amazing what range and quality of bass guitar sound you
can get on a synthesizer, and a little bit of reading up on the subject
uncovered a surprisingly long list of popular hits over the years that
used keyboard bass rather than an actual guitar bass, a fact which most
rock musicians are not aware of. Of course, a keyboard player
learns to play bass with his left hand as part of his basic training,
and with a good ear for harmonies (from singing baritone and bass
harmony parts) and a knowledge of scales and chords, a keyboard player
can put in a bass performance that surpasses that of any guitar bass
player. It is usually forgotten that historically, guitar bass
simply grew out of the need for a bass line in a group of guitars, and
it was generally the least talented
guitar player who got assigned to play those simpler lines. Bass
lines have also traditionally been played by tubas and euphoniums,
organs, and other instruments, depending on the kind of group that
needed them.
I never considered this as a young musician, and most
amateur pop musicians would consider it anathema - it's amazing how
we get locked into conventional "rules" about how bands should look and
perform, as we do with so many other aspects of our lives. We
admire the innovators, but we shy away from it ourselves. A
guitar bass seems required for a stage visual by most amateur bands,
maybe because of our
early memories of the Beatles, Stones, etc, but keyboard basses
produced by Fender Rhodes (used by the Doors, who never used anything
but a keyboard bass) and the Hohner electronic
Basset have been used in studio and on stage since 1960 by Genesis, Led
Zeppelin, Rush, Stevie Wonder, B-52 and many other top groups.
That was a revelation to me. With the range of bass sounds on my
synthesizer, I've enjoyed this new
dimension to my musical outlets and will continue volunteering as a
bass player for groups. My next step may be to look for a
"keytar", one of
those
synthesizer keyboards that you wear like a guitar, standing up, with
effects
buttons up the neck and a strap over your shoulder. They were big
in the '80's, went out of fashion for two decades, but now appear to be
coming back, with Herbie Hancock and many other groups playing the
Roland AX-7 or AX-Synth, among other models.
I also use acoustic piano, Lesley
and blues
organ, Fender Rhodes, sax and harmonica sounds for example, to create
familar licks and covers of original recordings, and a variation of
sounds from song to song. Here's the practice
space where I've been working
all this out - taking over our small dining room! It's a
comfortable spot, close to the kitchen...you can see my
trumpet, computer, practice amp/drumbox combo, etc. The flat
screen monitor over my keyboard is interesting: it allows me to pull up
Youtube music videos by various artists, lyrics, Band-In-A-Box files,
Finale music writing software, Word, and digital ultimate fakebooks all
at once - I would have died to have this capability when I was a
young working musician in my twenties.
I'm not sure what part music will play in my retirement. As long
as I'm travelling, the keyboard isn't a practical companion, unless I
can find a light, cheap little one that'll run on 12 volt, but the
sound on those is usually pretty tinny and unpleasant; but I'll take my
trumpet with me, and play on pianos found here and there along the
way. And I'll probe my travelling companions and the people I
encounter along the way for those who can sing, and like to do that -
maybe I'll take some favourite song lyric sheets with me.