I Choke Up While Watching a Band at a Parade

Can You Tell Me Why?

This is how it typically goes:

I’m standing on a sidewalk on a street somewhere, watching a parade. A band rounds the bend and heads toward me. The performers wear a complicated uniform with tufts of this and that and plastic and velvet, and each bears the weight of an instrument they’ve long practiced and polished. In unison with their colleagues their knees raise, their toes point a certain way, they raise their instrument to their lips, or do the telltale tap of the drum, their fingers begin the work, their eyes narrow in focused concentration.

I want to yell out a “Whoo Hooo!” But deep within my torso comes a tightening, an unmistakable sense of something… which chokes my vocal cords and sends tears running down my cheeks. I muster a few claps and bleakly smile, then I have to look away, wipe my face, and get my act together.

What is up for me, y’all?

I’m pretty sure it’s not sadness or fear. (To my knowledge, nothing bad has ever happened to me at a parade or at the hands of a band.) Dan asks me if it might be about belonging. As in, These people belong to something, and you lacked a sense of belonging when you were younger, so could it be that – that you see the very embodiment of what you longed for and it reminds you of that lack?

I appreciate the generosity behind Dan’s question. I’ve felt this way watching bands in parades since I can remember, so… maybe? But the effort of this band, their precision, the display that says, Hey this matters to me, and I’m doing it, and I’m here for you to watch feels less like something I long to join and more like a thing that is too beautiful for me to handle.

I wonder if the feeling within me is hope? Hopefulness? Hope for the world, for us as the humans who live in it – in that playing in a band in the middle of a street suggests that everything is going to be okay? Is okay? Maybe?

But no. I think it’s even deeper than that. And more visceral.

A military will march with precision with the same knees and toes and plastic, velvet and tufts, but they bear arms while a band bears musical instruments. A marching band is humans no less encumbered than soldiers, just less armored to the world. Not armored at all, in fact, and therefore quite vulnerable. Innocent.

Grown humans demonstrating innocence. Could that be what breaks my heart?

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Does a feeling like this ever come over you?

I’m deeply interested in what it’s about. If you can help shed some light on it, I will thank you.

xo

PS/In searching for imagery to convey my notion of a marching band as utter innocence, I came across the photography of Gabe Tomoiaga and found his photo of one of his sons leading a pack of ducklings to beautifully parallel the parade band image at the top of this piece. Please note, this photo is not a good representative of Tomoiaga’s breathtaking surrealism, where he blends his children into an entirely different world than is real, some of which I found to be stunning. See it here.

“Follow the Leader” by Gabe Tomoiaga

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