I‘ve not made a secret of volunteering with the band programs at my local school district. Even before my daughter, Ms. 8, enrolled in them, I started doing what I could to help them out, announcing their halftime shows, hauling pit equipment, and performing occasional patch-work on instruments so that they could be taken out onto the field one more time. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to get to do so for a couple of years now, and I hope to be able to continue to do so for at least a few more years.

Volunteering with the bands this year has taken me to an awful lot of football games, at home and away–and away games are generally away, two hours and more of drive time for me and up to half again as much for the students as they ride their wholly unmagical yellow school buses from our small town to that against which they play on any given week. (There have been more away games than home ones, too, given some ongoing construction concerns.) Last week was not an exception, even if, due to the threat of heavy inclement weather, the schools opted to swap game dates, so that the varsity teams played Thursday and their junior-varsity counterparts played Friday.

The irony was lost on few when, a few minutes into the first quarter of the game, the heavens opened and dumped something like an inch and a half of rain before the quarter ended.

I helped the students get things packed up that would not take the rain well: woodwind instruments, whose pads would swell and deform from too much wet, and pit equipment, some of which relies on circuits and power sources that don’t react well with water. And so I was, like them, soaked to the skin, and soon started to feel the creeping chill of a darkened evening after a front rolled through. Unlike them, I had had experience with such things, and I was able to help them gain experience with how to deal with them.

We were all wet, yes, and there was no sense denying it. And the woodwinds and pit needed to be put away. But the brass and the battery remained, and they played. At first, it was a scant handful of them. A baritone player whose plume drooped damply but whose spirits stood strong, blasting out a fanfare he’d been working on for weeks when the football team managed to make a good play on an unexpectedly muddied field. A sousaphone player blasting out the horn-call a departed friend had figured out. A drummer beating out a tattoo in time with the cheerleaders’ ongoing efforts. Each doing something against the shock of sudden water since passed, and each encouraged by a clap on the shoulder or a smile.

Seeing such, others soon joined. Sections stood to sound their songs. Drum majors, freed to call their cadences, queued up pieces and had the band play them. Clarinetists and flautists and saxophonists, hands without horns, lifted their voices to yell their pride and hope. Drummers hammered out cadences, and the band danced with them as they had hardly done before, those with horns swinging them as cued, those without feeling the rhythm and responding nonetheless.

The band that night was a band, moving as one in many parts and feeling, clearly, the exaltation of pouring themselves into a performance. And I was proud to be even so small a part of it as I was.

I look forward to seeing them do it again, though I’ll hope for a little drier a seat next time around.

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