Washing a Tuba as Metaphor for Summer's End, Sort of

As my son and I wrestled the tuba into the bathtub, I had occasion to consider how far we’d come in just a few weeks.

At the end of August we’d closed up the camp, and slowly drove up the dirt road from the banks of Long Pond and back to our “normal” house, the one where we live the other ten months of the year.

In no time at all the endless summer had become a vague, happy memory. The boys came back from Messalonskee Middle School and Belgrade Central with backpacks full of urgent missives: broadsides announcing the dates for Picture Day and Curriculum Night, requests to sell t-shirts for the annual fundraiser.

And along with all this start-of-year stuff, there was a note from Mr. Califano, the middle school band instructor, concerning my son’s future as a tuba player.

If he was going to practice at home, he said, we were going to need to find Zach a tuba. The “district” tuba could stay at school, for lessons and concerts. But we’d need a second one for the house.

We’d already learned you can’t take a tuba on the school bus. As it turns out, it’s easier to take a fully grown Angus beef on the bus than a tuba.

Unfortunately, a good tuba is hard to find.

You can’t rent them, like you can almost every other instrument, including glockenspiel, wood block, and oboe. So we made a quick call down to Al Corey’s to find out how much a new tuba might cost.

The answer: over five thousand dollars. D’oh!

Briefly, I checked ebay. A man in Bejing was selling a “Chinese tuba” for three thousand dollars.

I don’t know how to say “D’oh” in Chinese, but if I did, I’d have said it then.

Then—a miracle! Mr. Califano found another tuba, at Messalonskee High School.

I stopped by the school on the way back from work, and brought it home, and Zach and I opened up the case, and there it was.

The Haunted Tuba.

This tuba clearly had not been played for a hundred years. It was covered with an odd red tarnish that I soon determined to be “tuba rust.” Zach looked on in horror. “It looked like the last person who played this died,” he said. “While playing.”

Refusing to be beaten down by a tuba, we got out the brass polish, and set about scrubbing and rubbing. How long does it take to polish an antique tuba, you wonder?

Longer than you’d think.

At long last, we began to rinse off the polish. But as we did this, the toxic foam sloshed onto the floor, burning a hole in the rug. So instead, Zach took his shirt off, and hauled his tuba into the bathtub. Where he gave the tuba a bath.

Soon, we were drying the instrument with bath towels.

The only problem was that now there was water in it. Everytime Zach played it, it sounded like the tuba was gargling.

So my son carried the tuba onto the front porch. Where he gave it one vast, majestic blast.

At this exact moment, my spouse returned in the mini-van with our other son, Sean, just in time to see a gallon of grey water blasting into the air.

Deedie and Sean looked at Zach and me, covered with water and brass polish and foam. “Are you two all right?” said Deedie It was clear enough, she feared we’d lost our minds.

The next morning, I was woken by the call of a barred owl in the woods. “Who cooks for you?” it said.

Later, after the boys had headed off to school, I drove down the dirt road, back to the camp, and looked at the lake.

I was sad summer was over, but then we’d made a good start. Sean was selling t-shirts. Deedie was coaching soccer. And Zach was playing tuba again.

It was haunted when we started. But in less than a week, we’d made that tuba shine.