For Wilshire Baptist Church
LeAnn and I set out on Saturday morning for one of our regular walks to the big city park nearby, but when we got to the end of our street, we heard a familiar sound. The Garland Owls marching band was rehearsing, so we turned north instead of south to check it out.
Standing behind the band under some trees, we apparently were watching one of the early pre-marching season practices. The band was spread out in a typical “stage” formation on a parking lot painted with gridiron yard lines and numbers. While most of the band had instruments in their hands – the sousaphones didn’t – they weren’t playing. From atop a three-story steel tower with a drum major just below on the second story, the director worked the band through the basics.
When we arrived, they had just finished marching in place to the amplified beat of a metronome, and now they were standing silent and still, but apparently they weren’t doing it very well.
“Julian, stop moving . . . discipline people, discipline . . . Anthony, stop moving,” the director said. “It takes discipline, people . . . stop moving . . . if I told you to stop moving for one minute and I offered you a million dollars, would you do it?”
And then when a minute was up, he told them to relax and move a little while reminding them, “You’re out here in the heat at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. These are first-world problems, people.”
We watched a little longer as he led them through another exercise – marching forward a couple of steps and then backward to where they were – with more pithy philosophy such as “it doesn’t take talent to try.”
As we left to continue our walk, they began playing scales and marching in place with “the met set to 130,” a pretty good tempo for marching and playing on a parking lot on a hot Saturday morning in late August.
It’s interesting but even though we didn’t hear a single measure of any type of song, watching the band for those few moments brought back good memories for us – memories of the hard work, the physical grind, the trust in each other, and the camaraderie and pride of being part of something bigger than ourselves.
I was in the marching band in high school, and LeAnn in high school and college. We were in the band three years apart with her in Garland and me in Richardson, but both in programs influenced by the cultural and artistic influences of the day. And, there was something in the wind or water or whatever here in North Texas that had local high school bands competing fiercely at annual UIL competitions, and so our bands were held to very high standards. The pushing for excellence we heard from the Garland director of 2025 was not much different from what we heard and experienced in the 1970s.
Practicing in the heat on a Saturday morning in August – and continuing into September and October on school days before there was any hint of fall “football weather” – we fully understood why high school students in marching band were exempt from taking P.E. In fact, we lovingly called our director “Coach” because he and his assistants were coaching us with bull horns and metronomes every bit as much as the whistle blowers over on the football field. During my tenure in marching band, our band won more competitions than our football team.
We worked hard for those wins, and the football fans in the stands on Friday nights were the beneficiaries of all that hard work. Our marching band was smaller than others but by design. With fewer people, we had more room on the field for movement and intricate patterns as we played popular music of the day — Stevie Wonder, Chicago, Barry Manilow — as well as more traditional marching band fare. We were out there in full uniform regardless of the weather: 90 degrees, 30 degrees, blowing wind and rain. Only lightning could keep us off the field.
We totally bought into the philosophy of the band director in the “Funky Winkerbean” comic strip: “The football team will be playing before and after the band show.” In our minds, the crowd was there for us; we were ready to play out these lines from Don McLean’s “American Pie”:
“. . . the halftime air was sweet perfume,
while sergeants played a marching tune . . . .
. . . . the players tried to take the field,
the marching band refused to yield . . . ”
Looking back now, I know the discipline we learned for exacting halftime shows and competitions in the fall carried over to the concert stage in the spring. The conditions were different of course – in the spring we didn’t have to worry about the weather, and the audience wasn’t eating hotdogs and smoking cigarettes – but they still expected a good show. What’s more, come contest time, there were UIL judges lurking in the shadows of the balcony, and we always wanted to make Coach, our school and our parents proud. Most of all, we had a sense of pride in doing our best with lots of practice and discipline.
Reflecting on this later with LeAnn, she noted some faith lessons in these Friday night memories:
- God knows us by name and through spiritual disciplines is helping us become the people we were created to be.
- Sometimes our faith moves us forward and back in predictable patterns, and sometimes we’re standing still, but it’s all part of growing and learning.
- When it comes to faith, we’re all amateurs and it doesn’t take talent to try.
- In our faith community, everyone has gifts and talents that contribute to the functioning of the group. If one person is missing, the group doesn’t work as well.
Who knew that marching band was part of our spiritual journey?
Music still is very much a part of that journey for me, and I’m grateful to our Wilshire Winds ensemble for providing a place to keep learning and growing. There’s always room for more “band geeks” past and present, and I can make this promise: We don’t march, and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Actually, the second part is only half true. We still play with pride; we still want to play well – for the folks in the pews, for each other, for the Lord above. And, for Coach, who I know is listening too.