August 2009
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". Early
in the spring we bought a trailer-able sailboat
called Tiger Moth, and a
GMC Sierra Hybrid to pull it, but we had a July highlighted by
family visitors, including my parents
Tom and Kathleen. In the photo they are with my
cousin Tom on his
staircase. His father Tom and his mother Janice, my mother's
sister, are on
the top step. With three Toms in such close proximity, we
could have played the
drums. 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. After a June of strawberries,
we're
entering an August of zucchini, 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. Most of what we'd
look for on a vacation
exists right here with no effort to get to them. Let me
explain.
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. 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.
This
is, admittedly, a shared
facility and therefore very inexpensive for us, but it isn't a time
share. We can be there year-round, twenty-four hours a
day. Most of those that we share this facility with just
aren't there, or spend most
of their time on their boats when they're around, so we never feel
crowded. At the same
time, we have a dock community of
acquaintances to share a story and a laugh with when 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. The drinks are less than half of what they 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, including 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. There are
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. We share our island, across a bridge and behind a
locked gate, with
three
other clubs at which we have reciprocal privileges. One has a
decent restaurant with a great view, and another is where we store
our trailer-able
boat. We have good friends at the third, including some
musical
friends. We're connected to a large park which contains a
commercial marina, and on the other side there's a supervised swim
beach and trails
that lead out along a wooded peninsula to a lighthouse. The
trees are being
thinned out somewhat by the denizens of a local beaver lodge, while
the Ministry of Natural Resources does their best to deter
them. It's really like an Ontario
lakefront resort, and it's all ours, minutes from the door of our
house.
Here we remain for the summer, 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 any longer, "Been
there, done
that..."? It might boil down to the fact 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. We want to
be free to travel, so it feels important to deal with reducing
our possessions and making sure we complete our summer home
maintenance
projects. So it
is probably 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.
Our indoor cat 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 our outdoor semi-feral Siamese cat who I call Jasmine. She had her kittens in
our
furnace room and 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. 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 has become my
nervous metaphor. I must be like her,
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. Our
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. We're living the good life.
I played
music all summer with a variety of people and instruments, with an
emphasis on "play". 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 resurrected the band after two years of
dormancy. It was good
to play again with someone who can "hit the ground running",
competently performing a repertoire 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. I had plans to
travel during the winter when
he hoped to be hired out for gigs. He needed to find players
who'd be around
and were hungry enough to want to give up weekend evenings in the
cold
winter, lugging heavy equipment to modestly paid gigs. I only
want variety, spontaneity and "fun" in my
music-making.
I played various kinds
of music
with various combinations of people all summer. I played
jazz with trombone
and sax players, and with a jamming group of guitars, bass, drums
and keyboard. I played with a
finger-picking guitarist and slide guitarist duo for which I worked
on
blending in muted trumpet parts. I played with 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. These are progressively
less physically punishing sports. When you
retire, the
friendship of your still-working colleagues largely evaporates.
Something has to replace all of that. When it comes to playing
music, friendship and sincerity are more important to me than
money
from gigging, or the embarrassing delusion of recapturing a lost
youthful dream of local rock stardom. That disease afflicts
too many musicians of my vintage who are coming back out of the
woodwork as the importance of sports and career-building
recede.
I enjoy my release from deafening 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
any other way. A small amateur group just doesn't have the
same
level of technology, talent and instrumentation.
For the fall, I considered
rejoining the concert band, but ended up
being invited into the Scarborough Teachers' Choir run by Sheila
Brand. They 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 a 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.
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. It's
amazing what range and quality of bass guitar sounds you
can get on a synthesizer. I discovered 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. With a good ear for harmonies and experience singing
baritone and bass
harmony parts, a keyboard player
can put in a bass performance that matches or surpasses that of any
guitar bass
player. Historically, guitar bass
grew out of the need for a bass line in a group of guitars.
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. Yet the keyboard
bass
produced by Fender Rhodes was used by the Doors, who never used
anything else. The Hohner electronic
Basset and other bass keyboards 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. I thought about trying to find 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. They appear
to be
coming back, with Herbie Hancock and many other groups playing the
Roland AX-7 or AX-Synth, among other models.
I use acoustic piano sounds, Lesley
and blues
organ, Fender Rhodes, sax and harmonica sounds, to create familiar
licks and covers of original recordings, varying
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/drum box combo, etc. The
flat
screen monitor over my keyboard 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 traveling, 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.
I'll take my
trumpet with me, and perhaps play on pianos found here and there
along the
way. And I'll probe my traveling companions and the people
I
encounter along the way to find those who like to sing.
Maybe I'll take some favourite song lyric sheets with me.