High school was somewhere where you had to search for a place to feel accepted or heard. Some students found their special place as early as their freshman year, while others found theirs as late as senior year. Much like in college, the best way to find a person or group of people that you feel in-tune with is by joining a club or organization. The first one might not always be the right one for you, but you can’t stop looking. You cannot give up hope. I was lucky enough to join 7 clubs in high school, but the one that I made the strongest connections in was the Marching Band. The countless hours of “torture” (reading and interpreting the sheet music that was presented to us) was the glue that bonded us together.
One would think that performing our show would be the most rewarding experience, but as it turns out, the path towards the goal was more rewarding than receiving a superior rating at a competition. That’s not to say that you should feel safe and accepted just after a couple of practices. It takes a while for you to find yourself at first, but then once you do, it’s very easy to spot the people you relate to. Much like in sheet music, there are different instrumental sections of the band that you can find people you relate to. In sheet music, there may be a certain portion on the music that you may not necessarily feel any emotional connection to -let alone that you think sounds catchy- but no matter what, in my band there was never a section of the Friday-Night- Football music that any of us didn’t like. Everyone was on that field to give it their all, and being together as strong and united team was what brought us to victory around every turn.
Before the games, the band would always spend 4+ hours every evening preparing for the show. It was mentally and physically exhausting; but we didn’t have to do it alone. After a while, you learn to perform the music without evening putting any thought into it. This is a concept that is commonly referred to as “muscle memory.” Of course we always made little tweaks here and there, but there was always that memory of the music we had learned in our bones. If you told us to start at B-7, then we would go to our position and begin the show from there, without hesitation. That wasn’t the only thing muscle memory gave us the ability to do though. As a lot of people know, whenever you want to learn from your past mistakes -whether that be when you were playing an instrument, a sport, or singing- you tend to record yourself while you perform whatever activity you are doing to. At every practice and football game, our band director would ask the photography staff to video up-close and full-view angles of our show. Then the following day we would all sit down during Band class at school and listen/watch. Then he would have us jot down on our music sheets what adjustments we needed to make.
By the end of the year our sheet music would have so much writing on it that you would think it was a work of art that should be hanging in a museum somewhere. All the progress that we had made throughout the year was recorded on those pages, in a language only we could decipher. We would also listen to them at home (typically while doing our homework), and when we did, we could remember every single rep and every single note that we had performed with all our friends. These friends eventually became like a second family to everyone. We all knew that our relationships had been forged from being presented with the same show to perform.
Every year when we would eventually reach the “Florida Marching Band Competition” at the Tropicana Dome, we would all huddle together on our bus seats and review the foreign scribbles on our sheet music. Even though we never ranked 1st place at the state competitions, the text on our music was proof enough that we had given it our all; which was more than enough. Those symbols that we had drawn on our dot sheets recorded the path that each of us had marched-on to get to that very moment of glory we had been preparing-for for months on end. They were our biographies and scrapbooks to showcase our unforgettable adventures together. I can always look back and know that no matter where I end up, I can always count on the friends I made there to truly listen to what I have to say, and allow me to feel accepted and heard.
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