Ambling Around Lost Lagoon

Today, despite the heat and clinging to the shadiest paths, I angled my way towards Lost Lagoon.

I have an old relationship with this spot and like to return to it for meditative walks, but I have not been a very devoted lover in the past year.

Carefully avoiding the huge, green and messy Canada Geese turds sprinkling the graveled path, I made my way past the “closed for renovations” Nature House and counterclockwise around the lagoon.

I was hoping I might be lucky and catch one of those crystal clear redwing blackbird songs on a point very close to where the free trolley stops, but I guess it is already too late in the season.

I was not walking. I was studiously ambling and had made a prior decision to do just this. I took my sweet time. It felt great.

Earlier, while passing the little park above English Bay, I had stopped to listen to a large brass jazz band in the gazebo, playing some pretty funky and esoteric music, much to the dismay of the mostly elderly crowd who, for the most part, would probably have been more comfortable with Colonel Boogie but seemed determined to enjoy none the less.

My ears were still tuned to hear the song of the redwing blackbird, when to my astonishment I heard the deep, meandering tones of a brass instrument playing musical scales. It sounded to me like a Euphonium, a brass horn second only in size to the Tuba.

I have been listening to Rufus Wainwright’s great album “Want One” and it’s catchy single which begins with the oomp-pah-pah of a Tuba and as I rounded the corner, there sat the Tuba-ist, a heavyset, bespectacled and bearded youth dressed in black and holding the brassiest and gleamingest of miniature Yamaha Tubas. He was practicing, and in what a perfect setting! There were no neighbors to complain and the sound resonated so beautifully among the trees and over the surface of the lagoon.

I still thought it was a Euphonium and stopping to question him, was soon set straight! There followed a brief and wonderfully friendly exchange in which he told me he was just finishing his vacation and preparing for an audition with his Tuba.

I praised his tone and embouchure, at which term he smiled and asked me, “I take it you once played the Euphonium?” I smiled and said, “No, it was the Baritone Horn” a step further down in size from the Euphonium.

It was on the Baritone Horn, in the HMCS Chippewa Sea Cadet Brass band that I received my most priceless musical education in sight-reading, the light classics and jazz standards from my teacher Sub. Lt. Ed Rigg, who was a retired clarinetist of the Benny Goodman era. His nickname for me was “Katrink”.

I had been the lead drummer in the Navy League Cadets drum and bugle corps prior to that and was terribly disappointed that they already had enough drummers when I applied, as I had just seen Sal Mineo in “The Gene Krupa” story.

Never in my wildest dreams, did I realize what a depth of musical education I was about to and did receive, carrying this unwieldy instrument on the bus, every Thursday night to band practice in the heart of the freezing Winnipeg winters.

I wished the young man the best of luck and continued my ambling down the hot and dusty trail beside the lagoon.