Friday, August 30, 2013

Down Nostalgia Lane Tonight

When I was driving home from work tonight, about 6 PM, I saw 5 school buses traveling together.  One of them was marked with the name  "Coppell Band Bus".  Coppell is a suburb of Dallas.  Wow!  That brought such good memories back!  When I was in high school I played the flute in our high school marching band, the Lima Senior High School marching band in Lima, Ohio.  What a great time we had.  If you've ever seen Ohio State do script Ohio, we did it too, only we spelled Lima.  Guess where our band director went to college?

Every year we took one long road trip to an away game.  We would take 3 buses - one for each group of sophomores, juniors and seniors.  When we were sophomores, on the way back, during the entire way back, we tortured a couple that was making out.  Every time they would kiss, someone would yell, "Lights", and we would all turn on our lights.  We thought it was funny.  The adults with us almost went crazy.

When we were juniors, we lost the game and some fans from the opposing team caused some issues with us.  We were upset.  To make it worse, our band directors declared some edicts - none of which I remember, but we were outraged.  One of our members, Phil Heil, got up at the front of the bus and began a diatribe of what we were going to do.  He'd go on and on for a few minutes and we all yelled him on.  We thought this was funny and rebellious, and this went on for 10-15 minutes.  Finally, the nicest and mildest of the band directors got on the bus and screamed at us.  As no one knew he had it in him to scream, we were all shocked and got quiet.  Soon after, we left the stadium,  stopped at a McDonald's for a late supper and everyone completely calmed down.  Food will do that to you, right?

I don't remember our senior trip at all so it must have been completely uneventful.  I'm sure we had fun because we always did, but our trip was nothing like either of the two previous years.

So I hope those kids on the Coppell Band buses are having fun and making their own memories.  Playing in the marching band is one of my best memories from the past and thinking of those days always brings a smile to my face.  Ya know, I need to make a quilt!

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