Marching band
The fifth grade band was small; I was the only cornet player who stuck with it. We were all beginners, and we sounded like it. I enjoyed learning. In sixth and then seventh grade we continued a small group, with one concert at the end of each semester, two a year. Then we had a combined concert, us and the two grades below us. Suddenly there were three trumpets (a cornet plays the trumpet part); I didn’t know how to handle having others next to me playing the same notes. I had to be told to play softer, because I was trying to play over them to hear myself. I was embarrassed.
The next year I started playing the actual French horn, a loaner instrument the school owned. I fell in love with it, really in love with its sound. I did not fall in love with practicing. I played it well enough, and was the only French horn player, so as long as I did well enough, it was good. There was not another French horn player until my senior year, and he was a freshman, inexperienced, not a competitor.
The band director for my freshman year was new, his first job at a high school. He got out the 20 year old wool uniforms and started a marching and pep band. We marched in a parade; we played at football games. I hated that part. Football season in northern Wyoming meant freezing temperatures and playing in the dark, because it got dark early. We had stadium lights and frigid metal bleachers, with little metal lyres to hold tiny music pages on our instruments. We wore coats and gloves and did our best; the townspeople, those devoted enough to show up to freezing football games, seemed to appreciate us.
Basketball season was better; we got to play indoors, in the enormous new gymnasium with brown metal bleachers that folded into a vertical wall when not in use. It was a maze underneath the bleachers; I was dimly aware that smaller me would have loved to roam around under there. Freshman me was over five feet tall and gangly, too big to fit comfortably between the metal braces.
There was no marching band in the spring; spring sports were, I think, baseball and track, neither of them conducive to marching. The school baseball team played on fields far from the school building, a mile away across the whole town. It was a small town, okay? And, though I didn’t know it, the band director wasn’t thinking of marching. He was looking for a job somewhere else.
