I walked out of the house yesterday morning and was overwhelmed by the smell of hot, wet dirt and grass. The smell of sun and dew and what was to be a scorcher of a day. I read that the heat index got up to about 107. There was a bit of morning haze, quickly burning off. It made me very, very uncomfortable. To the point I had to physically make myself walk to the car to go to work. For a while I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that it smelled like all the mornings I used to dread eventual marching band practice.

I can’t honestly report that I enjoyed every minute of marching band. I didn’t. Our director was cruel, vicious at times, and set us to tasks that were nearly impossible. Though this never happened to me, during my sophomore year, part of the drill for the alto saxophones was to go from the 30 to the 30 in eight steps. That’s eight (not fully grown) human steps to cover 40 yards– 120 feet– of ground. While playing Bernstein. The next year we did a 2-step 720 degree turn. Ballerinas with big brass instruments we were.

I had a bad attitude. I can admit that now. But I loved playing and I wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to play no matter what. It’s true, I’m still very bitter over not being made drum major. I would have made a crap drum major– I can conduct but that’s about it. I’m not a natural leader; I’m so unnatural at it that it can’t even be trained into me. I’m a second in command if there ever was one, so I topped out at section leader and soloist and I see now that that was better.

But it wasn’t all bad. I have remarkable memories. At least one memory that if I try even a little bit, make the smell of hot, wet grass seem like promise and joy. I have great memories of friends, and buses and trips being silly. Most of my good performance memories involve being silly or scared– scatter drilling off the field or standing so long at attention on a boggy field that I nearly lost a shoe.

My best memory of being on the field was at the Vanderbilt Marching Invitational 1994. Vandy was always an interesting contest because we didn’t have to drive forever to get there, so we could rehearse all morning (getting progressively more tired and more anxious). And Dudley Stadium is very, very steep. So a horn pop that would be about 35 degrees above the horizon in a standard stadium is closer to 80 at Vandy. Weirdly near vertical. There’s a big retaining wall, and then the seats just go up and up and up and then there’s the press box, towering over you. It was also the only contest we marched on turf, so footwork had to be impeccable. No bits of grass to hide sloppy toes.

Since it was in the middle of Nashville, plenty of boosters could be there. There were bands from outside the city and suburbs, but it seemed to be mostly Nashville stuff. So people who wouldn’t normally travel to a contest that was in Kentucky or Johnson City or somewhere else, would travel downtown to Vanderbilt to cheer us on. It was always fun to glance across the stands and see hordes of yellow and blue and white. We weren’t expecting a huge crowd, just the bigger than average because brothers and sisters crowd.

That year, we had the fist girl Sousaphone player in the band in a long time, maybe ever for that particular band. Ladies on sousaphone are rare, though not unheard of. My drill for that show, I don’t remember the exact title, but it was all Gershwin, all the time, ended right next to hers. The last two minutes of the show, we were never out of arms reach of one another. The finale started with a company front and hard, hard percussion hit (accompanied by two counts of high step and then a big pop on the next beat when the line stepped off) and then a wall of sound that was the end of Rhapsody in Blue (click here and play the sample to dig the trademark Clarinet smear and the theme, played by the Trombone section). Bigger, wider, louder, more remarkable than any Delta airlines commercial, we nailed that thing. We got it all over the place. And at Vandy, we hit it extra hard. We let that big cement retaining wall tell us how loud we were, then blew it back that much harder. The drill ran in and out on the diagonal, like a big harlequin. We formed up into a three column diagonal for the last few notes, huge, soaring notes, Gershwin! And in those moments, I let my eyes drift away from the drum major and to the stands, because the blue and yellow and white section was going bananas. They were leaping and waving pom poms and going more berserk than I have ever seen marching band spectators go. And in the center of them was the girl-sousa’s brother– the captain of the football team, surrounded by every last one of his teammates in a blue and white away-game jerseys. The entire football team. The football team!

I knew the cut was coming, so I looked back at podium and took it, kept my horn up like I was supposed to. The sound rang and rang off the wall while the crowd got louder and louder. I could hear girl-sousa, the freshman, giggling to my right. I said, very quietly, “Oh my God.” On my left, a fellow senior, a Piccolo player, squeaked, inarticulate at the spectacle of the whole freaking football team cheering for the band. I think we both started to cry a little. It was only a few seconds until we heard the click, and the cadence started and we marched off the field.

We took Best in Class that year and they let me carry the trophy to the bus. I don’t remember why I was accorded the honor, except that I was the soloist who started the show and somebody was being very, very nice to be. But even having won that award and that trophy as tall as I was, it was nothing compared to seeing the football team, who we cheered for every week, cheering for us back. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before and I can’t say as anything has been that dramatic or poetic in my life since. I suppose it’s the equivalent of being the mousy girl in glasses and frumpy clothes who befriends the new girl from out of town and then, just in time for the prom (to which no one has asked her, despite the fact that she’s pined for the Big Man on Campus for years), she goes from Ugly Duckling to Swan and wins the heart of the Big Man and everyone lives happily ever after. It was a March Band Molly Ringwald moment and it was fantastic.

I’d like to think I thanked him the following school week– I know I had economics class with him. But I probably didn’t– bad attitude and all that. Maybe I didn’t because he’d probably never understand how much that meant to me (and probably to others). I was once told a story about a high school football player who returned to watch a game a couple years after graduation and was flabbergasted at the amount of people who really didn’t care about the game. He was surprised that the band marched on Friday night as a show of support and spirit, but also as a dress rehearsal for a contest the next day. That and the rivalry between bands at the game was just as intense and loud as the rivalry between the football teams. It’s the insularity of youth and the isolation of cliques that make us think we’re all alone out there and I couldn’t have expressed that, even if I had really wanted to.

I’d like for there to be a movie about a marching band one day. I know there’s Drum Line, but that’s about drum lines, and while those are an important part of any marching band, it doesn’t give you the whole picture. The whole picture would start at Band Camp (where nobody does anything even vaguely raunchy unless they’d really like to run three miles and do a million push-ups) which is hot, and unpleasant and makes you ache. And it would continue through a normal practice season (which is hotter, more unpleasant and hurts worse) and through a few contests to the big one at the end, where the little band has so much pluck and great tuning and inventive drill that they triumph over the behemoth band, so overgrown at 400 winds that they can’t really march anymore. And then somebody gets to carry a trophy into the sunset. Or maybe it won’t have a Hollywood ending and the best moment will be when insularity and isolation fade away and the football team cheers for the band as loud as the band ever cheered for them.

I’ve noticed lately that many people are very lazy with words. I seem to be on a Latin kick lately and got eyeballed askance when I corrected the word “indexes.” Indices. Third declension, masculine or feminine (whereas a third declension neuter word “tempus” in the nominative case, is “tempora.”). Then I got eyeballed even harder, with additional tilt of head, so I look up the etymology just to make sure it was in fact a Latin word used in English. The definition also indicated that the plural could be “indexes” but I think that that’s there as a crutch.

I take things too seriously, I know. I hear a chorus of word-careless people in my head all the time going, “It doesn’t really matter. Just relax. No one will notice.” I’ve taken that advice in the last several blog entries and they are riddled with errors. It’s no good.

At its heart, I have a hard time understanding why people would ignore such wealth. The English language is an amazing thing. Sit still for a minute and think about it. It’s Germanic (already an anomaly there) and had no problem reaching out to absorb any word it needed for any purpose. Then, after it became the language of the world’s biggest empire, it had no problem inventing words, either from different languages or later, from whole cloth.

I like to imagine what would happen if I went back in time. More than about 300 years and it would begin to be difficult to communicate, even with English speakers. Go back 500 years and you have to work hard– see Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. In the entry dated Mardi, Juin 20, 2006 (check out the French influence on English– the Normans were French), he writes, “A playe of myn werkes ys to hotte for friares in Spayne.” And a couple other sentences. “A play of my works is too hot for friars in Spain.” They’re both English. Mine is standardized American Modern English. His is Late Middle English (or near as the blog author can recreate it from source material). And I love it! It’s fascinating. It’s the same language! His entry on “The Ocks Menne” is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time.

The additional tilt of the head, as above, was the non-spoken language indicator that maybe I was a bit off. Not incorrect, but perhaps taking things too seriously. Should English evolve to the point where we blend our grammar with the grammars of the languages our loan words (and/or cognates) came from? Index is a Latin word. When we apply English grammar its plural is “indexes.” The meaning is clear. But if I said to you, “Do we need to create separate indices for these chapters?” would you understand me? Is my own, personal, often merely mental clutch at hypercorrectness making me less intelligible? Was I always merely semi-intelligible and this is making it worse?

In high school, I had the same English teacher two years in a row and pretty much the same classmates for those two years. By the middle of the second year, if the teacher called on me in discussion, one of the other students, a football player who sat by a bookcase full of dictionaries, would reach out and start to throw them around the class. The teacher laughed at this. I was both hugely embarrassed and very smug– not good for making friends or influencing people.

But I don’t know how people can ignore something as beautiful as language. A word for everything! And in English, at least six words for everything! Plus a system of prefixes (prefices?! No, from the Latin fixer, “to place” and as noun, the New Latin [canonical, one is to assume] “praefixum” which would be second declension and therefore “prefixa” as datum becomes data) and suffixes (suffices!?). Beauty! My Latin is rusty and I could be screwing up all over the place. But I’d be gleefully screwing up all over the place with a sense of adventure and wonder and respect.