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I received a call this weekend from a friend from high school that I don’t get to talk to very often. He’s in school to become a band director and he’s working with Centerville High School’s drum line this summer to get them ready for their competitions. He’s a little short-handed and wanted to know if I could help him out with the drum line for a couple of days this week.
This is the same drum line that he and I spent 4 great years performing with and generally devoting our lives to. When we were in high school this was a very important thing to us. We spent all of the school year, not just the summers, leading the drum line and trying to make it a fun and rewarding group to belong to. I was a section leader and was very proud to be considered the leader of one of the top 5 drum lines in the state.
Being the section leader for that section many times meant getting a look behind-the-scenes during staff meetings and other similar situations that most band members were not allowed to be present for. As a result I felt like this was "my" drumline eventhough it was just a group of my peers and the only reason I was the section leader was because I had gone to state competitions a couple of times. In short I was just a little more experienced than most of the other percussionists.
If you really boil down what it was that I loved so much about band it comes down to this: I just wasn’t very good at anything else and in band I was one of the best. As sad as it sounds I was considered a "drugged out loser" by many of the teachers and even some of my classmates. I didn’t do well in my classes and barely did enough to scrape by and graduate. But in band, though many people would think that it was easy to get an "A" in that class, I worked very hard and strived to be the best percussionist in any high school. Who’s to say whether or not I got very close, but I felt like I did and isn’t that what really matters?