Family Christmas

No, this isn’t a sackbut.
It isn’t even the cheesy saxophone.
Big parental failure.

Rick’s Sackbut, concluded

…Of all those musical relics, only one looks pretty much the same today as it did half a millennium ago: the sackbut. Nowadays, we call it a trombone. We got to Paris a few days before Christmas, and I came with one task: to find a toy trombone for my firstborn.

Well, it was Scarlet Ribbons time, for sure. I hiked around, so help me, to all the grands magasins de Paris: la Samaritaine, Galéries Lafayette, Le Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, le Printemps—nobody had a sackbut for a two-year-old. So I tried some of the humbler places: Prisunic in Passy, Monoprix, all to no avail. By the time despair and weariness crowded out the last of my frantic energy, it was too late to go out to the Marché aux Puces: it was closed.

Closest I could come was a rather cheesy little plastic saxophone, which didn’t deceive¹ him at all. Couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of him opening it.

¹Unless you render it in French: la déception translates to “disappointment.”

1967-68:

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