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A short story from Lou “Gluefish” Wilson.
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I used to love the 6D’s I played with in high school. They were easy and fun and didn’t care which one I played on a particular day.
They were pretty and shiny and nobody much cared that none of us hit any of the notes we aimed at, and we all just had a good time. We boys in the horn section didn’t take too good care of them but we weren’t expected to.
I remember the time Andy and I and these two 6D’s snuck off in back of the band room and played Brandenberg 1 for the first time, Andy and his 6D on first and me and my 6D on second.
You never forget your first Brandenberg experience.
But the first one I moved in with was an Italian, an older Sansone Bb 5-valve who had lived upstairs at Lockie Music in Downtown LA for many years.
She was very temperamental. She wouldn’t tell me anything about her past. On good days she taught me tricks that only Bb’s can do, and I’ve never forgotten how nice she was when I did something to please her. Sometimes she just didn’t want to play at all. Especially when she found out I had been fooling around with a floozy Holton Farkas at the Navy music school.
I was a jerk then and didn’t realize what I was doing to her. The Farkas must have been played by every guy that ever played horn in the navy. She was loose, rattled, didn’t care if you showed up or not. I made the excuse that the Navy wanted me to play with a double.
I didn’t care for her, and I told that to my Sansone.
But things were different from that day on. Finally, the five valve broke my heart. She ran off with a Jerk from Idaho, in the Seattle Navy Band in ’67. But I guess I deserved it. She still lives with him in Idaho, and is happy now. I hear she has played in some very high places.
But my 8D was the love of my life. She had lived with my best friend from high school. He had turned his back on her to study Political Science and Chinese, and soon she and I were driving up and down the coast, commiserating about our lost loves and playing parades and concerts all over the northwest.
For a few years, things were going pretty well for us. We did Strauss I and II together, and pretended we were Russian spies, and played Gliere with vibrato. Then we came back to LA, played a little community stuff and I went to school.
I could see her growing more and more distant as I concentrated more on my studies than on her, and she got to the point where she was demanding so much of my time I told her I had to let her go. I waved good-bye to her at a West L.A. pawn shop in February of ’72. Last I heard some student at UCLA picked her up for a song.
The years have gone by and I have dreamed of her often. Many times I would wake up remembering a dream I had of holding her on my lap in some concert or another, or traveling with her in my MGA around the country. Or I would find myself looking in the horn sections of this symphony or that opera orchestra to see if she was still around. I never saw her again. Mostly the memories of her have faded now. My life has been empty without her, and I have built up my career with my computers and programming.
I had a little fling with a new 10D in a store a few years ago, but she was too high class and expensive for me…
This year, I’m 64. By now I have gone through the entire gamut of middle age angst: the sports car (’70 Opel GT), the sports (broke my elbow playing hockey in the Hewlett Packard parking lot) but by far the most interesting part is this: I ran across my old 8D’s twin sister at a used music store in Phoenix. Amazingly, she was in very good shape.
I thought it was my lost love, at first. Knew better, though, when I brought her up to my lips.
She now has moved in with us and my wife doesn’t quite know what to make of her. “Pretty”, she’ll comment, or remark about how nicely she sings. But I suspect she’s a little jealous of the time we spend together, relearning Pottag and Kopprasch, a language all our own that my wife hasn’t had an inkling I could speak in all the time we’ve been together.
Yes, she’s the twin of my old flame, my old 8D, but she’s not the same – she sings differently, complains about different stuff, mostly doesn’t understand me quite like my old one did. We’ll probably never be much more than good friends.
But at my age the friendship is about all that’s left that’s important.
