In which I borrow a PEN

Hello!

I haven't felt much like writing lately. It's been busy, and I've been down with the flu since Tuesday. I'm finally starting to feel a little like myself again, so I thought I'd sit down and yarn a bit. I promised the PEN Pals story a couple of weeks ago and never got around to writing it. It's a good one.

Before I get into that, though, a couple of congratulatory notes:

1. Congrats to Steven, who wrapped his first season of basketball last night. He played for the 7th grade team at his school, and they finished the year with a 5-1 record. Steven was one of the guys who came off the bench, and he was usually good for a rebound or two and a lot of good effort. I feel like his biggest contribution to the team was that even when he was not in the game, he was watching and cheering for his teammates. He would jump up and cheer, give high-fives, and keep everyone encouraged. He was a good teammate, and when he got the chance to play he worked as hard as anyone else did. You had a great season, Steven, and I'm really proud of you for being part of the team. I can't wait until next season!

I have some pictures, and maybe a little bit of video, that we shot of Steven in one of the games. I'll have to see if I can find it, then I'll post it under separate cover.

2. Congrats also to Lee Wright. Lee is one of Ben's friends who I met a long time ago, in an apartment far, far away. We share an interest in writing and Star Wars, among other things, and we have always been enthusiastic readers of each other's writing. Well, Mr. Wright has recently been named winner of a playwriting competition in Chattanooga. He will have the chance to see his play produced on the stage in late March and early April. I'm happy to see Lee get some recognition for his writing. He likes to do Southern stories with characters you'd swear you knew back in the day. I can actually say I know a "real" writer now! That's what's got me inspired to sit down and write this today, and I have a short story I've been sitting on for two and a half years that I'm going to start messing with too, and see if I can get it finished. Who knows, maybe I can be a real writer too. Whoo!

So, the PEN Pals story...

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It was my senior year of high school. In fact, I might could go so far as to tell you it was November 14, 1987, but I'm not entirely certain that's the correct weekend. Anyway, it was a Saturday, and the Parkview High School Panther Marching Band had gone to Columbus, Georgia for the Fountain City Marching Festival. This festival was hosted by Hardaway High School back then, and it was huge. We went every year and it was always a great trip. It was held in Memorial Stadium, which is a cool old granite stadium that hosted UGA-Auburn football games way, way back in the day. We would bus down to Columbus and spend the whole day at the festival, watching other bands until it was our turn to get our uniforms on and perform, then stay through the evening until the awards and the screaming and the foofaraw was over. If you've ever been to a band festival you understand what I mean about the foofaraw.

My senior year, we got down there fairly early in the day. We all went into the bleachers (on the left side of the stadium, if you're looking at the picture I linked to above. In fact, keep that picture up. It might help you imagine what I'm describing) and watched a couple of bands, then we started to break up. We were on the left side of the stadium because the main press box for the stadium was on that side, so that is the direction the bands were facing when they played.

There were merchandise tables at the lower end of the field (in the grassy space above that bottom parking lot), and we drifted through there, back to the stands, all around, until me and a group of 12 or 15 others wound up on the other side of the stadium, sitting in the middle section of bleachers, underneath that smaller press box. Of course, from that side, you couldn't hear the bands as well, but we weren't really paying attention anyway. We were sitting and chatting and having a good time. We were the only people on that side of the stadium, I believe.

The way these festivals work is, one band plays, then the next comes on, and so on, all day long. There's usually 5-10 minutes between performances, as one band marches off, the next one comes around, marches onto the field, and goes through their preparations. During one of those down periods, watching the previous band march off, someone in our little group said, "Hey, let's do the wave." So we did. Of course, there were only 15 or so of us in a little clump, so it was more like a ripple. Still, our schoolmates on the other side of the stadium cheered for us, so we decided to put on a little performance of our own.

As the next band came around and began to take the field, we formed various shapes--lines and circles and squares--and "waved" them. By this time the entire crowd on the other side, not just our group, was beginning to cheer for us. We had to do something to top it off. Let's spell a word, someone suggested, one letter at time, and wave each letter! Yeah! OK! What word? Hm, we're a bunch of hormonal high school boys, right? Yeah! Which means we're stupid too, right? YEAH! OK! Let's spell PENIS! YEAH!!!

So we form a P. Well, by this time the next band is on the field playing. We don't care. We form our P. Wave (cheers from the Parkview crowd, who naïvely assume we're spelling PHS or something pedestrian like that. Girl, please). We form our E. Wave (fewer cheers from the Parkview crowd, who now have no idea what we're doing, as the band on the field continues to play). We form our N. Before we can wave it, we see our director Mr. Beach, our drum majors, band captains, and others, coming around the top of the stadium towards us. We scatter.

They chased us down like a bunch of escaped pigs. They rounded most of us up by the merchandise tables. We got a sound scolding from Mr. Beach, although it was more in the sense of "you made me look bad" than "you made the school and yourselves look bad", but that's just the way he rolled. We got to march that day, but only because he didn't want 15 holes in his formations. We got straight ones, which is what every band wants to do at festival. I have a video of our performance that day. I wish I had a video of the band that was on as we were in the bleachers doing our thing. Heh.

Oh, but the story's not over yet.

We got back to school and the shizzle hit the fazizzle. The principal wanted to kick us out of band entirely for embarrassing the school. Beach wouldn't do it, because we had his top tuba player, a couple of high-ranking trumpets, and a couple of good drummers in our group. They finally decided to ban us from the spring band trip to Panama City. There was a big meeting with the parents where this was announced, and my dad was apparently all, "They're kids, they did something stupid, just let it go" and Beach told him no, we're not going to just let it go.

To this day, my dad will tell you that Mr. Beach was a @#$%&, which is why he kept forgetting to call Bill's name during awards ceremonies when Bill was in band. I say no, it wasn't because Beach was a @#$%&; I say it was because Bill was my brother. I could write another 2,000 words about how Mr. Beach couldn't stand me, but I won't. This is already way too long. Maybe another time. Anyway, we didn't get to go to Florida that spring, and we soon came to be known as the "PEN Pals," since P-E-N is all we managed to spell before the Gestapo came and stopped us.

Story still isn't over.

I'm not going to tell you what happened while they were in Florida, because it really doesn't matter (we had some fun, though). I will tell you that we all signed each other's yearbooks that year with things like "can I borrow a PEN?" or "NEED A PEN!!!?!?" Our senior class did a last will and testament and I left Mr. Beach a pen. Heh.

There's two last little postscripts, perfect codas to the whole thing, then the story's over.

The next year, I was a freshman in college, and went back down to Columbus to see the festival performance. My brother was a freshman in the band that year. I was standing with some of my PEN Pal friends who were still in the band, and we were looking across the field reminiscing about what had happened the year before. I said, "Do you want to go back over and finish it?" I managed to keep a straight face long enough for them to look at me like I was crazy, then we all lost it.

The second takes place two or three years later. I want to say this was my brother's senior year, because I don't think there was anyone left in the band from when I was there, by this time. I had come to Parkview for a game and was visiting my brother in the band section. I said hello to Mr. Beach, and was hanging out with my brother, who was the tenor sax section leader. He introduced me to one of his little freshman scrubs. The kid was all yeah, whatever. Bill said to me, "Watch this," then told the kid, "Sam was a PEN Pal." The kid's eyes went all Keanu and he said "Whoaaaa." Four years later, and we were still part of band lore. That was wicked. I wonder if the story still lives on today?

The End (?)

In which I ramble on about shoes from 1985

I'm starting to feel a little like Robert Fulghum. Not that I have his facility with the language, or his empathy, or his wit, but I do have all these stories saved up to tell you. Unfortunately, I can only tell you one at a time. The trouble is, by the time I'm ready to sit down and tell you one of them, something else has happened that makes me think of a different story entirely.

That has happened to me today.

I was going to tell you about when our stove caught on fire, and what happened in the aftermath and our journey towards new range ownership. Then in my next post after that I was going to maybe tell you about Scrabble. For now, though, I'm going to share an old marching band story, and it's all Lee Wright's fault.

Lee has a wonderful webspace at Blogger called The Wright Rants. You can find a link on my sidebar, or there's one here. He's not a frequent blogger, but when he posts it is well worth your time to go read what he has to say (he has a link to my blog as well--you'll recognize it by it being the one that doesn't work. Actually, I take that back. His link to Ben's journal doesn't work either. Come on, Lee! Slacker.). His newest entry, posted yesterday, is full of stories that he and some friends swapped over the weekend about falling down. I don't have any falling-down stories of my own to contribute, but a comment he made amidst the anecdotes did trigger a thought. He was talking about an old gym regimen, and described his usual workout outfit: "The workout clothes consisted of black sweatpants and a tee shirt. I was wearing black socks because, as I've said, I had not yet met Christie and, therefore, not had the complete wardrobe makeover that people so often comment on."

Ah, black socks. Now there's a memory.

It's not as mortifying as it seemed at the time, and in retrospect it's not even that funny, but it's a story about friendship, perseverance, and--most importantly--attention to detail.

In my Freshman year of high school (1985--God, has it been so long?), I was a trombonist in the Lithonia High School Marching Corps. We had taken our usual spring trip to Orlando, Florida, and were playing a series of performances in and around the city--marching in a parade at Disney, doing some kind of symphonic competition--the usual spring band trip stuff. One of the events was a parade at Circus World (which would be closed in less than three years, re-opening as Boardwalk and Baseball, which closed as well, soon thereafter. Maybe it's all my fault somehow.).

The plan at Circus World was for the band to march in their parade, then for the band members to change out of uniforms into causal clothes and to spend some time enjoying the park. Such as it was. The parade went without a hitch, and we retired to our buses to change--the boys to one bus, the girls to another. The changing was taking place with much banter and teasing back and forth. Suddenly, to my horror, I realized that I had not packed socks and shoes in my change of clothes bag. I had packed a t-shirt, hat, and shorts, but no socks or shoes.

Understand--this means that I had to wear black socks and black shoes with my shorts. In this day and age I wouldn't bat an eye, but in ninth grade it was a disaster. I was heartbroken. I told my friend David to go on without me, and resolved to stay in the bus for the rest of the day. David and a couple of other guys talked me into coming out, and I made it as far as the luggage compartment before I lost my nerve. I climbed up amongst the luggage and again stated my intention to move no further. David settled in as well and said he was staying too. When faced with such loyal friendship--he was willing to forego Circus World to stay with me!--what could I do but emerge, feet black-clad in clunky band clodhoppers, and venture into the park.

Of course, the day had a good vibe. I quickly forgot what was on my feet, and except for some ribbing from my friends, the day passed without incident. Looking back from 21 years later, of course it did. It was just a pair of shoes. To a shy 15 year old, though, it was much more than that--in the moment.

To this day I remain a bit short-sighted in my attention to detail (not to mention my short-term memory), but I grew that day. For practically the first time ever, I ventured outside my comfort zone. I allowed myself to be seen in public in clothes that I was embarrassed to be seen in. Of course, five years later I would have done it intentionally, and now, at age 36, I actually go out in public wearing open-toed shoes.

Maybe not as good a story as Lee falling off his porch (which actually reminded me of the scene in desperate Housewives last year when Gaby pushed what-his-name out the window into the hedge when Carlos came home, except that Lee wasn't naked. He was wearing black socks, however, which is what got this whole train of thought off the rails in the first place), but there you go. Of course, this entry got me thinking about other band-related stories I'm going to have to tell you someday--the PEN pals, Emory's Pep Band (such as it was), and all the various times that Mr. Beach got on to me for being a less-than-enthusiastic band member (which is a bit of a misconstruation, actually--I was enthusiastic, I just didn't care whether I was as good a trombonist as Todd Buck was, and it made Mr. Beach mad). So now I have to add all these band stories into the "to blog about" queue with the stove and Scrabble and the 77's and my marching band obsession and WMRE and Curious George and fantasy football and Okinawa and all the other stuff I need to talk about.

I name-dropped Robert Fulghum at the beginning of this entry. I'll quote him at the end, from the last page of All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten:

"...this is a place to pause. If the fabric of existence is truly seamless, the weavers must still sleep."

The most pointless blog entry ever

I really don't have anything specific that I want to write about. I find myself wanting to write, though, so I'm going to start typing and see what comes out. I sometimes do some of my best writing that way; sort of a spasm of stream-of-consciousness dreck that doesn't really mean anything. If I get really froggy I'll start writing really long run-on sentences that don't really have a point but just sort of meander around several different vague sort of points but then take a left turn and get lost in the woods and then you get really tired as a reader because they just go on and on and sometimes I put a semicolon in somewhere but usually I just put in another and or two because nothing makes a run-on sentence truly run on like a good collection of ands, you know?

I don't really know why I'm doing this, but I was probably inspired because I teased Ben about writing an entry on his own blog that was about why he wasn't updating his blog. I said in a comment, "Is a blog entry bemoaning the fact that there have been no blog entries really a blog entry?" In that same spirit, I call b.s. on myself and ask whether a blog entry that isn't about anything at all is really a blog entry, either? Then I think, heck, Seinfeld was a TV show about nothing. Why does my blog have to be about anything? Does that mean I'm comparing my blog to Seinfeld? Oh no, there's no comparison there. My blog is a lot funnier than Seinfeld. I'm not near as annoying as George Costanza (Ben might be, but I'm certainly not), and my girlfriend is way better looking than what's-her-name, the girl with the hair who was in Christmas Vacation as the snooty neighbor who got attacked by a squirrel. Remember that? God, that was hysterical. What a great movie that was, and is. One of my favorite holiday movies. Of course, I also love A Christmas Story, and The Santa Clause is cute too, especially when the little girl remembers that he said he was lactose intolerant. That might be one of the most unbearably sweet movie moments ever. I go, "Awwwwwww" every time I see it.

My condo complex had a Community Night last night at the nearby Burger House, and several friends and neighbors got together. I sat around with Brandon and Cam, two denizens of the local high school drumline (Brandon on bass, Cam (I hope that's his name and I'm not misremembering it. If I am, sorry, dude. Assuming he ever reads this...) on cymbals), and we swapped band stories for over an hour. Three band geeks sitting around talking shop while the adults in the group talked about more important things. But really, is there ever anything more important than band stories? Obviously not, if this blog is any indication.

Anyway, I've been palavering for far too long, and I need to actually get some work done today, so I'm going to sign off for now and see if I can get to it. Last one out, please turn off the lights.

Go Big Orange!

I went to the Parkview High School football game tonight (representing the Class of 1988). The game was played at Meadowcreek High School in Norcross and I drove over to see them play, primarily to take advantage of a beautiful autumn evening. The weather was clear and crisp and beautiful. I actually got a little chilly during the second half. I had on an orange long sleeve shirt (for school spirit) and my Falcons safari hat. Parkview came into the game with a record of 5-2. Meadowcreek came in at 0-7, having been beaten by Brookwood (Parkview's big, big rival) 60-0 a few weeks ago (the week before Brookwood beat the hell out of Parkview, actually). We found out that yes, Meadowcreek really is that bad.

Of course, the whole adventure started with the drive over. Meadowcreek High School is actually closer to my house than Parkview is, by about 15 minutes. In normal conditions the drive from my house to Steve Reynolds Blvd. (where MHS is located) would take about 25 minutes. Tonight, it took me 80 minutes to get there. 80! Damn the top end on Friday afternoon, anyway. If I hadn't left the house 30 minutes early (intending to eat on the way over), I might have missed the first quarter. As it stands, I didn't eat on the way, and got there about 10 minutes before kickoff. $7 for a ticket to get in. Not a bad deal.

Right away I could tell it was going to be an interesting evening. I had never been to a game at Meadowcreek before, and in going there, I saw something I had never seen before in Gwinnett County--a stadium with only one bank of bleachers. Every other stadium I have ever been to in Gwinnett has bleachers on both sides of the field. Meadowcreek does not. They don't even have a track around the field. The cheerleaders stood in the bleachers. I had forgotten what it's like to be at a game with both sets of fans on the same side of the field and both bands blasting away from the same set of bleachers. Wild. I wound up sitting next to the parents of one of Parkview's wide receivers and his mom and I chatted all through the game as his dad kept yelling encouragement and admonition: "Come on, Chris!" "Stay with him, buddy!" "Catch it!" and so on. I regaled his mom with stories of Parkview gridiron ineptitude from my era. Turns out her son is a senior, and was born 12 days after I graduated from Parkview. Oy. Old much?

Parkview immediately showed dominance in the game, taking a 14-0 lead by the end of the first quarter. It could have been 21-0, but for a fumble deep in Meadowcreek territory. The game would continue in that vein until the end, Parkview pretty much doing whatever they wanted on offense, and winning the game 43-7. It could have been 60, had they really gotten a little luckier on a couple of plays. We looked good, and the backups got a lot of playing time in the fourth quarter.

Meadowcreek just isn't very good, I'm sorry to say. They try hard, but just aren't very good at all. They actually reminded me a lot of the Parkview teams when I was there in the late '80's--not a lot of size, not a lot of speed, not a lot of wins. Their only TD came on a freak play where the quarterback was in the shotgun, the center blew the snap, the guy was running for his life 20 yards behind the line of scrimmage, flipped a desperation pass to a man in the flats who went all the way across the field, came all the way back, and in the process gained 35 yards and scored. One of the damndest plays I've ever seen. Oh, and I have to tell you about one of the most boneheaded plays I've ever seen a punter make. Meadowcreek was punting. The snap was bad (a theme for them tonight, actually) and was rolling along the ground, inside their own 20 yard line. Their punter picks it up, starts to run with it, actually breaks a tackle, stumbles, starts to go down, then suddenly--just before he falls flat on his face--decides to kick the football! Unfortunately for him, when he tried to kick it, there were two Panthers six inches in front of him. The ball hit one, the other picked it up, and ran it in for the score. WR Mom (I never did get their name) and I just looked at each other like, are you kidding me? No wonder they're 0-8.

I can't leave it without describing halftime. For me, a big part of the fun of going to a high school game are the marching bands at halftime. This week? Ugh. Parkview's band was technically proficient, but the show was boring--the worst show I've ever seen from a Parkview band. I was very disappointed. The Meadowcreek band was, if you can believe it, worse than their football team. First off, you have to understand that their band was something else I had never seen in Gwinnett County--a show band. What I mean by that is, a band like you would see in the movie Drumline--drum majors in tall fuzzy hats, dancing, blatting tubas, and so forth. Usually, I dig show bands. I love the moves and the music. It's like a festival. Unfortunately, this was the worst show band I have ever seen. It was also the smallest. I counted maybe--maybe--45 horns. The drumline, the foundation of any good show band, consisted of three basses, two field toms, one quad (one!), and one snare! One! How do you have a drumline with one snare in a show band? And God, they were awful. I don't ever expect proficient playing from a high school show band, but this was truly awful. Easily one of the worst high school bands I've ever seen, and following on the heels of a lackluster Parkview performance to boot. Halftime was a disappointment. Of course, both bands kicked ass in the stands, but on the field, not so much. They tried hard, and the crowd seemed to be into it, but I was hoping for more.

So all in all it was a decent night. The bands weren't all that, but Parkview won a game that was fun to watch, if a bit boring after halftime. I went by Waffle House on the way home and got some grilled cheese sandwiches and Bert's Chili to warm myself up, then called Darlene to talk me home. Definitely a good way to end the evening. I got my high school football jones in for the fall, and welcomed in autumn in the best way I know how--by going to a football game and cheering for Big Orange. Nothing like high school football on a Friday night.

I'm going to bed.