Friday, October 29, 2010

Same Thing... Different Decade

or, Marching Band, and I Can't Believe We're Losing to Ridley... Again

Tonight was the one game of the year when Julia's cheer squad gets to go to the high school football game and spend part of the first half cheering along with the big girls. She was very excited, as you would expect, and to tell the truth, I was too. And for more reasons than just seeing my girl have such fun.
I graduated from high school in the mid-1980's, and played trumpet in the marching band all the way through. I would have to say that all the band and orchestra memories are the single largest bunch by far. I don't remember our band being tremendously serious in terms of practicing non-stop and entering all sorts of competitions as some do, but we took it seriously enough.
Fall meant marching band, and marching band meant football games. We started practicing in August before school resumed, for many hours in the heat. Once school started, we were on the field every day that there was band, and came back after school several days a week for evening practices. These evening practices were generally a lot of fun, working on our routines, but especially socializing with friends. And girls. Cheerleaders and rifles and flags, oh my!
The two kinds of events we performed in were parades, which I generally hated, and of course the football games which made it all worth while. Doing the routine at halftime was fun, but the good memories come from so much more. The whole atmosphere of it. Goofing around in the band room beforehand, or the bus ride to the away games. Scrambling to find some misplaced bit of uniform. The tall fuzzy hats. The uncomfortable wool and plastic uniforms that managed to accomplish two diametrically opposed things at the same time: completely unbreathable in hot weather and providing no insulation value whatsoever in cold weather. Cold metal bleachers. Trying to find a warm place to keep my mouthpiece on those frigid days so that when it came time to play a song you could actually do it. Being a trumpet player and getting to stand on the very top row of the bleachers when the band was in the stands (the "position of honor" as us trumpet players liked to think of it). Marching into the "stadium" before the games. Being turned loose and on our own between the end of the halftime show and the beginning of the fourth quarter. And the rides back from the away games, late at night, on dark buses. Ah, to be young again...
Somewhere in and around all that fun there actually were football games, although I don't remember us paying too much attention to them as they were happening. It was enough that their mere existence gave us a reason for being. And we generally weren't all that good back at SHS. Which brings me full circle back to last night. When we walked into Garnet Valley's field for the game, everything looked so familiar it was like stepping back in time. The kids hanging out having fun, the inadequately lit field, the big bleachers on the home side and the little bleachers on the away side. Everybody bundled against the cold. This was the first high school football game I had been to since leaving high school, and it was kind of surreal.
Before the teams took the field, I was standing by the fence watching everybody get ready, and I turned to the guy next to me and asked who we were playing. He said "Ridley." Wow. Ridley was Springfield's big Central League rival when I was a kid. Although I use the term loosely I suppose, since they beat us every year for many many years running, and probably wouldn't have had any idea of the importance we placed on that game. We were rivals in the sense that a windshield and a bug can be rivals, with the bug thinking "maybe this will be the time I come out on top." It never happened. So last night, we stayed through the end of the halftime shows, then left to get my cold girls home and into bed. When we left, the score was Ridley 19, Garnet Valley 0. Some things never change.

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