A Few Sentences from my English Paper

When I sit at my piano with my Christmas lights on I can feel all the good things just flow into me, things like driving at night and Smithbridge Road and candles and bonfires and rivers with blue water and the perfect wave, the perfect note, the perfect song; NPR and Tastykakes and hermit crabs and red lights and she-likes-me-back and the interplay of rhyme and rhythm and running your fastest mile and baby books and parents and children and friends and being in love; memories and futures and shutterbugs and Orion and seeing Haley’s Comet once in your life and winning both showcases and solving your first Rubik’s Cube and sunrise on the beach and staying up talking way too late and kittens and first kisses giving you butterflies, opened eyes so you can see her smile because she is happy to be with you in a field by a stream and wondering if maybe, yes, she does feel the same way after all these years of thinking no! she is so far above me; teacher and student crying on the last day because they actually care and crying over loss but at least there was something in the world good enough to care about losing in the first place; hugs and heartbeats and sleeping in on snow days and being young and believing you’re invincible and having time and being alive. I know that sentence was long and that you probably won’t believe me that these all just come into me when I play my piano, but I promise they do. And if those things aren’t what define home, then I don’t know what is.

Peace out.

Lighter II

My lighter broke. First it wouldn't spark to ignite, then I toyed with it trying to get it to work, and the thumb piece broke. About half the fluid was left. I put it in my memory box.

Peace out.

Missed

I'm often overwhelmed with sadness and regret when I think about all the things I never wrote down.

Peace out.

Synthesis 004: Souderton

I went to Souderton, I think, three but possibly four of the seasons that I did drumline. I remember the first year, it was one of the first competitions, and it seemed impossibly far away. We spent the entire day there and we were all exhausted. I think that was the time that I pretty much fell asleep next to Sarah Cory on the bus and that started the joke about me "sleeping with" all the girls in the drumline. This was my freshman year, when our show was The Devil Went Down to Georgia, and we lost every single competition we went to. I remember what the school looked like - for some reason, I have an image of it in my head as very thin but very long. I know this can't possibly be the case but that's how I remember Souderton. I also remember when I was sitting and watching other drumlines perform, one of the snare drummers from Souderton started talking to me. He was really nice, but I couldn't remember his name, even though it wasn't strange at all, probably something like Kevin. He was a senior, white guy, with short brown hair, not too tall but not very small either.

We went back to Souderton the next year with Synthesis. I think it was a little bit later in the season this time. I remember that entire competition day it was raining furiously. For some reason, both unloading and loading the bus occured at night in my memory. I guess it was just really gray... although I guess if I think about it hard enough I can remember moving in during the light now. I knew we were there because I saw a school that I thought looked really long.

So like I said, it was really really raining that day. Like, extremely, extremely rainy. My hair was soaking wet by the time we were done moving in. I don't know how we got the instruments off the bus, but it must have been in a wild rush and an absolute mess. Gina's synthesizer, I think, was taken inside the nearest door we could find even though it wasn't the one we were supposed to go in through. We never plugged her synth in like we were supposed to - we just had her hook up to a car battery. We were really afraid of that battery getting wet, and I remember we wrapped it in a trash bag and booked it indoors as soon as we got it off the bus.

I remember walking down the long thin part of the school after loading towards the unit's room sometime that day. My hair was absolutely soaked. There were two girls walking in the opposite direction down the hallway, and one of them held up a camera and flashed a picture of me and then said "Thank you!" and laughed with her friend and walked away. I didn't know whether to be flattered or embarrassed. I forgot what they looked like two seconds later so there was no way I could find them again to ask.

The snare drummer that had talked to me last year had become an instructor for the Souderton drumline. I remember they called themselves the Mirage indoor drumline, and we were jealous of their super cool name [at least, we had been when we were just the Garnet Valley drumline].

The competition ended and we were all standing outside just before the bus, waiting to go home. I can't remember if it was still raining at that point, but I'm going to assume that it wasn't if we all decided to wait outside. I suppose I was pretty good friends with Marc and Brian at that point. One of them jumped on top of the other, and then someone shouted "boy pile!" and I jumped on top of them, too. So one of them was holding the other as well as myself on their back. I'm pretty sure Viv has pictures of me doing that, sticking my tongue out, on top of a boy pile with Marc and Brian in the dark outside of Souderton.

Peace out.

Synthesis 003

One day the pit was practicing with Miss Papa right outside the chorus room. I forget where my instrument was, or which instrument exactly I was playing at the time, but I remember I was against the wall that the back door to the auditorium is on. I remember Marc and Brian were sitting down with their backs against the same wall, too. Miss Papa told me to play my run in part two, or just to play part two, or something along those lines, and asked them if they thought it was crazy or something along those lines. I remember Brian didn't really say anything, and Marc just said, "It's a lot of notes." I was still afraid of Marc and Brian then because they were from Chichester and Marc never smiled and always wore a hat. He thought I was a senior for a long time, and I think he told me later that he wasn't impressed with me because he thought I was a senior, but then when he found out I was a sophomore he thought I was a lot more impressive since I was so young. I'm not really sure on how that came about though.

//

Like I was writing about before, our sets had a "frame" basically for some drawings to be held in - of clocks and clock designs, of course. At first the plan was to have blinds that we could just quickly flick from one side to another, from design to actual clock face. I remember Evan Gibbs, the only black member of the drumline [who played bass], was an extremely good visual artist and was always pulled out of practice to help design the artwork on the props. Whenever I would walk through the band locker room in the beginning of the season, Evan would be in there bending over some huge canvas and trying to draw something. I think mostly he was there in the very beginning when we were trying to get the blinds idea to work, and I think it was partly his influence why we decided we couldn't use them and they were just unworkable. No matter what medium he tried to use, he couldn't get it to go on the blinds right, and he just knew everything would end up looking all wrong. We ended up using large bedsheets instead, I think.

Another interesting thing was that the clock we used on everything - our shirts and our props, etc. - read an impossible time. The minute hand was just a couple minutes past vertical, but the hour hand was halfway between two hours. I forget if we knew this was impossible when we designed the clock, but I remember they designed it that way so that the hands would be displayed properly on the sets... Oh well. I don't think the judges took points off.

Peace out.