Reflections on Band Pt.I

So my oldest is going to middle school next year. Recently, he had to fill out his registration forms for sixth grade. He had a host of elective class options to choose from, one of which was sixth grade band. His parents were former band students, so the potential was certainly there for us to apply pressure on him to participate. But we left it up to him. And there were some other classes he found interesting, so he chose not to join band, which is fine, because I'm certain he will still have opportunities to participate down the road if he has a change of heart.

The whole thing led me to reflect on my band career: Why did I participate? What did I gain from it? What did I give up in order to be a part of band for so long?

Band for us started in fifth grade. A lot of kids joined, probably two-thirds of the class, because frankly, there wasn't a whole lot going on in my town in 1986 extracurricular-wise. I played the trumpet both years of elementary school, and while we didn't officially have "chairs" let's not kid ourselves. I was first chair. We moved on to junior high, where I was ostensibly the second chair trumpet in the seventh grade band, although I don't think that we did the chair system there either.

In eighth grade, I made the switch from trumpet to baritone. I had this terrible baritone that had been salvaged from the junk room at the high school. The little screw that held the bell of the horn in place was faulty, so the bell was prone to fall off at random times. So in order to keep it in place, it had to be attached with some heavy duty tape. It was sort of a lose-lose situation. Either your instrument fell apart at inopportune times, or you looked like you bought your instrument from a dumpster diver. Plus, I had to practice at home on weekends and frankly, it sucked having to pack that huge thing on a schoolbus jammed full of rowdy kids.

A couple of times a year, we would have a joint concert with the junior high and high school bands. I don't know about anyone else, but for me personally, I thought the high school band kids were the coolest (again, late 80s/early 90s San Luis Valley - the bar wasn't set real high in terms of cool) and that they sounded awesome. And then during the spring concert, they would honor the graduating band seniors. And it was then that I decided that I would some day be one of those cool band seniors.

By the time we reached high school, a lot of the kids who had started out in fifth grade had dropped out, opting to seek out their own paths to coolness. I upgraded to a better baritone, which wasn't exactly new, but at least stayed in one piece. After being the only baritone in the eighth grade band, I joined a quartet of baritones for my freshman year of high school, some of whom were prone to profanity-laced opinions of the musical abilities of the trumpet section. (One thing about the low brass section during my era: we had a tendency to think that in terms of musical acumen, there was us, and then there was the rest of the band.)

But I had arrived. I was in the high school band. I could look at those eighth graders and say, "Yeah, that was me you heard ripping it up on Kris Kringle's Jingle at the Christmas concert." And I'm sure they were looking at me thinking, "Someday that will be me up there doing Rockin' Robin like that at halftime of Buena Vista v. Centauri."

(Because this is getting lengthy and I'm not close to making my point, I'm going to have to make this a two-parter. Aren't you excited?)