I should be performing at Roy Thomson Hall tonight.
I performed there in 1987, when I was 17 and my high school turned 75. I sat in the trombone section alongside alumni who’d graduated decades and decades ago, and we played wonderful, challenging, exhilarating music, to at least one standing ovation. My friends and I volunteered at the school over the celebratory weekend, too. We talked about where we might be in 2012, for the 100th. We tried to imagine kids, jobs, mortgages, people not yet met. I had a whole lot of trouble envisioning all of these. The one thing that was always clear was that I’d be on that Roy Thomson Hall stage again, playing music with old friends.
Only I’m not.
I still have these anxiety dreams: I’m sitting in front of a music stand, clutching my trombone. I raise the mouthpiece to my lips. I take a deep breath. I focus on the music—and I can’t read it. It’s gobbledegook. I feel sick. Everyone’s staring at me.
I wake up.
Generic anxiety, yes—but it’s specific too. Music defined me, as a teenager. It gave me purpose, friends, joy. It made me love high school. It carried me into adulthood, when I joined a community orchestra. The last concert I played with this orchestra was a pops one—movie music, including (gasp!) Star Wars. I belted out Darth Vader’s theme, even though I was feeling horribly nauseous. I was pregnant with my first child. After she was born, it was too hard to make the rehearsals. I was tired and I needed to be near her—and then, when she was older and didn’t need me near her quite so often, I was scared. I hadn’t picked up my trombone in years. It would take work to get my embouchure back—and there was so much else going on in my life now. The few times that someone asked me to sub in that same community orchestra, I balked. Mahler? Are you kidding?
Then came this year. Facebook messages from high school friends: “Will you be playing at the reunion??” Invites to dinners and a tour of the new school that’s gone up atop the bones of the old one. I responded “No, unfortunately”—or I didn’t respond at all. I’m not quite sure why.
I’m so happy now, in the 2012 I couldn’t imagine 25 years ago. But tonight I’m missing 17 so much that I can’t swallow over the lump in my throat. I miss those heavy black music stands and the sheet music I had to tape together so that it wouldn’t drift all over the floor. I miss sitting in that back row, the only girl amongst a sea of brassy boys. I miss that horrible polyester grey miniskirt that clung to me in the freezing rain that inevitably fell on the Santa Claus Parade. I miss Shostakovich and Beethoven and doing the Oom-Goo-Baa. I miss the thrill of that last, long, glorious chord, and the silence before the applause.
Happy hundredth, North Toronto Collegiate Institute. God help me, I miss you.
Caitlin Sweet, Class of ’89
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