B Flat Double Bass

I've been making my confessions of a geek to any number of people lately, and the one thing that really sells them on it is when I tell them about being in band. That pretty much seals the deal. "Oh. You were in band." Not only that, but I played tuba in band. That's not the cool instrument to play in band. That's the goofy, comic relief instrument to play in band. When I first told my junior high school band director that I was going to play tuba for him, he asked if I didn't want to play baritone instead. I had spent the summer before taking private tuba lessons, and I wasn't about to be stuck playing some wanna-be tuba - I was going to play the tuba, but thank you very much for asking.
My father used to ask me about my choice, especially when he had to haul me from place to place with my sousaphone (the marching version of a tuba, developed by John Philip Sousa). He wondered why I didn't pick the piccolo, an instrument that I could easily shove in my hip pocket and walk home from school, instead of the great fiberglass beast that filled up the back of our station wagon. It came as a great relief when I entered eighth grade I was allowed to keep the ancient, dented brass sousaphone at my house while I played the shiny white fiberglass version at school. I still needed help dragging my oversized case full of tuba to my weekly music lessons, but they were on Saturday mornings, so I could load up on Friday night and be ready to go the next morning. All I had to carry to and from school was my mouthpiece.
When I got into the high school marching band, I kept the brass sousaphone at home, kind of a parting gift from my junior high band director. I kept practicing, and by the time I was a senior, I was section leader. Well, I was the only one who played tuba full-time. During marching band we had four or five other guys who couldn't really play, but we needed to spell out "BOULDER," so we needed eight sousaphones. When marching season was over and concert band began, I sat with a group of guys who were usually doing the band director a favor by playing low brass because they had too many saxaphones or oboes or whatever. I remained steadfast in my tuba commitment. For about a month, we had a loan of a pair of rotary valve tubas - beautiful instruments that played and sounded like nothing else I had ever experienced. But alas we never chose to buy them, so I went back to the tired old piston valve concert tubas that the school had owned since the Truman administration.
After high school I was done playing music. The sousaphone stayed at my parents' basement for years after that. Much later I collected up my old trombone and the sousaphone and took them to a music shop where they looked them over and told me they would give me seventy-five dollars for the pair. It seemed like a good deal at the time, since they were only gathering tarnish and dust where they were. I heard later that the people that bought them had a side line of turning old instruments into lamps and furniture. I'm guessing that's how my tuba ended up. I kept the mouthpiece; sometimes I play "Taps" on it. It makes a very silly, sad sound, but I guess that makes sense, doesn't it?