Marching Bands Make Me Cry

"Calgary Stampede Marching Band", by Frank Maurer on Flickr, from Calgary Stampede 2008
Thank you, Frank, for sharing this.

This little story came to mind while I was writing Insider Tips on How to Watch the Calgary Stampede Parade.

My first visit to Calgary was back in the Middle Ages when our high school band came to perform in the Calgary Stampede Parade. Our red and white uniforms looked a lot like the official Calgary Stampede Marching Band, very much as they do in this picture. The white shoes were really hard to keep clean in the Stampede Parade marshalling area because, although the parade route itself is well-maintained and the horse manure is swept up before it gets cold, that's not how it was backstage in the hour or two we spent waiting for the parade to start. Fresh and deep.

But it was a fun trip, and playing in the parade was a fantastic experience. Up until then, I'd been in a lot of parades, but they were tiny compared to Calgary.

The band was a huge part of my life in high school. Thanks to our music teacher and band leader, Mr. Gregg Arnason, we travelled and performed as very few school bands in those days, and even now, ever do. When I think back to what he achieved with an ordinary band from an ordinary town, I'm overwhelmed. As an adult now myself, I don't know how to even begin to take some 50 or 60 kids from Canada on a three-week tour of Japan, but he did it. And much more.

I went through most of my twenties without going to many parades. Well, none. How many single, childless twenty-somethings do you see at the typical Santa Claus parade, anyway? It wasn't until after having children that I went to a parade again, and this time it was the Calgary Stampede Parade. Oh, it was all fun and games watching the horses and the clowns until... the plinkety plink of a distant glockenspiel should have had me on guard. The rat-a-tat-tat of the snare drums should have been my clue to run. But I couldn't escape it. The band came closer, my lower lip began to quiver, my eyes began to water, and it was all I could do to keep from sobbing.

Heaven knows what crazy neural pathways have wired my tear ducts to my band ears, but there you go. I cannot watch a marching band go by without crying. It's a curse.