At first glance it would be easy to intimate that my Aunt didn't like us very much. Nor thought much of our musical tastes let alone our decorating tastes. And one might infer that we, as a family, would not be best pleased to be gifted this affront to our sensibilities.
Well, one would be wrong. As one, the 6 of us hooted with laughter and hugged dear auntie. She "got" us. It was the perfect family gift!
It was not as though she set out to find an item of this particular hue. Instead it was one of those "time and place" kind of things. She was working at the time as an ESL teacher for adults in an old brick Elementary school in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver. That neighbourhood right now is a combination of homelessness and attempted gentrification with some of Vancouver's first houses,19th century wooden affairs that became Japanese immigrant houses, then Chinese immigrant houses, rooming houses and flop houses. Druggies share space a little uneasily with the next wave of fashionable and innovative renovation for hip middle-aged artists and those who can't afford west-side Kitsilano.
The school in question was being renovated as it was not in great shape and would no doubt be the first building to topple in an earthquake, sending bricks on tender heads, not great advertising for a school catering to Canada's newest residents and future citizens, let alone its children. The gymnasium, like so many others of its era, had a stage at one end, with storage cupboards below. when these were being cleared out, decades of unremembered things appeared, including this sad representative of the brass family. Who knows what accident or intentional incident defied its current shape, what happened to its valves and mouthpiece and, even more mysteriously, why it was saved and stored. Was it a fit of pique the band leader experienced when a stubborn musician refused to honour p, or pp, or, ppp markings in a score, and then a guilty hiding of the evidence to avoid paying for it out of a lowly teacher's salary?
We will never know. And it does not matter. For decades my family's umbrellas were stored in it beside the front door. We would try to play it and were only able to made a hornish-like sound that might have attracted a member of the Cervidae family keen on procreating its species. I am now the proud owner of it, and I do not like to say it's because no one else in the family wants it but sadly I fear it is true. It resides by my front door as in days of yore, but sits empty of umbrellas as they are too large and heavy for it and it topples to the ground, threatening to damage my fragile old fir floor. And besides, it might get damaged!
