Magic

The saxophone looked as pretty as it did 28 years ago, when I last opened the case - a shiny alto saxophone, yellow gold with green felt pads. It was surprising because it had been passed around the nieces and nephews since that time and then stored away for years, after everyone took up guitar or football. The reeds were where I left them, in the velvet button down compartment. When I pulled them from the tissue paper, I found one of them marked with the name ‘Ant’ in red texta - in my brother’s childhood handwriting.

Mum had the sax reconditioned and sent to me for my 40th birthday. It was a bitter sweet present.

Music first came into our house in the form of a baby grand piano. It lived in the lounge room and became the centre of our home. It was the most beautiful thing, especially when the lid went up. I loved pressing the notes, one at a time, and watching the hammers move up and down. Mum organised lessons for all of us (four kids under 10) with a lady called Mrs Rosengren. She would drop us into Mrs Rosengren’s yard once a week after school, and we would take it in turns to go into her studio and show her our scales with a straight back, our effortless arpeggios, and Valses with feeling. 

Someone said my fingers were too short to play the piano, and that I could never be very good because I would find it hard to reach between the notes, but Mrs Rosengren said not to worry about that because her husband had fingers like sausages and he was the best musician in town. She called him in and asked him to show me his fingers. They were like sausages. I imagined putting sauce on them. Then he played a show tune. He was the best musician I had ever heard. So every day I practiced stretching between the notes, to prove I could reach further than I could. Then every day, after I had finished with scales and Bach, I got out the show tunes books. I think I learnt the first six bars of every song.

The piano was the jewel of extravagant cocktail parties - in my memory, they are stored as magical events.

The twilight was filled with the sound of cars turning gravel up our long driveway and women yelling ‘darling!’, as they rushed down the lamp-lit footpath in their feather bowers and sequins. The men wore tuxedos and carried black cases with trumpets, banjos, and violins. Mr Rosengren brought his fat fingers. They all gathered around the piano, drinking champagne and smoking from long cigarette holders and cigars.

In the day time, these people were just friends of my Mum and Dad; doctors, actors, a hair dresser, a teacher, a lawyer. But when Mr Rosengren started those hammers dancing along the strings, they became a musical theatre ensemble. They could play anything and knew the words to everything!

‘Come taste the wine

Come hear the band…’

The banjo player always smiled like there was nowhere else he’d rather be and the trumpet made the room swing, or maybe I had been sipping some pink champagne from the bottom of an abandoned glass? Well into the night, the house filled with smoke, and a collection of songs that would play in my head for the next thirty years.

I started a little duo with a friend who had a very pretty voice - I accompanied her on the piano. We got one or two gigs in the lobby of the only five start hotel in Wagga Wagga. People sat around drinking Moselle while we performed the themes from the movies, MASH, The Rose, and Endless Love. Sometimes guests came onto their balconies to listen. I was also the pianist for some theatre restaurant shows - improvising minor chord arpeggios to announced the arrival of the evil suitor, while the crowd boo-ed and warned the heroine, ‘He’s a bad egg!’

It was some years later that I took up the saxophone - perhaps a well needed break from all those scales and Bach. I had imagined making a room swing with that instrument, just like a trumpet. I joined the local Big Band and went on music camps, where we played Duke Ellington, Glen Miller, and Benny Goodman. I could never hear if I was playing well, but the sound of all that brass from the middle of the orchestra was thrilling to me.

In my last years of school, I decided I had more important things to do than practice music. By the time I stepped into life, music was something that I used to do. I don’t remember even thinking about it - I just dumped it like a day old present.

It’s been seven years since Mum sent me the sax. For most of that time, it has been sitting on a shelf in the store room, collecting dust and making me feel bad. Just like the piano in my living room, which is holding up a vase and some art. I do play occasionally, when I make the time; but the dust that settles on the lid makes me sad.

Is this what regret feels like?

I was flippant with my life choices when I was young because I had so many. I remember how excited I was, all the time, because I couldn’t possibly fit everything in! So I chose some things and I didn’t choose others. But I tasted everything.

I love plonking away at those keys, and singing when the house is quiet, and I am alone. I love struggling through Burt Bacharach’s syncopated tunes, counting out loud, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and.. like Mrs Rosengren taught me. I love that my short fingers still remember that Chopin Valse, and that I can play it with feeling, if not accuracy. There are memories in these moments that still thrill me, so I will enjoy the magic when it comes.

A few days ago, I pulled the saxophone off the shelf. I dusted it off, took my brother’s reed out for safe keeping, and drove it over to a friend’s house - a good friend, and a wonderful jazz musician who performs with the best in town. I laid it on the kitchen table and lifted it from the case. I took my time putting it together, making sure the neck was symmetrical and the reed was perfectly aligned with the end of the mouthpiece, and then there was no reason to hold onto it anymore, so I handed it over.

He blew past the reed and filled the house with big robust notes as he worked the green felt pads and found his fingers. But it was only minutes before the sax began to settle into his arms and the tone softened. Then it came; a gentle trill, held in the room for a moment by the resonance of someone gently exhaling.

I am looking forward to hearing my friend play that saxophone with his band. I know it will be magic.