Act II
Frank and his family moved to Maryland. Like all moves, it was a blend of the certainty of friends left behind and the hope of friends yet to meet. Neither of which were much fun. The house his family moved into was brand new, in a small subdivision of homes that were mostly still under construction.
His house was really close to the high school, which would be good if Frank were attending there, but he wasn’t. However, it did mean that Frank could go to football games without needing a ride. Frank thought football was all right but certainly not great. This was as much qualitative as anything else; high school football, in Frank’s observation, consisted of barely organized plays running back and forth on the field until someone accidentally scored a touchdown. No one, ever, kicked a field goal, probably because none of they players on either team knew how to kick straight enough, high enough, and long enough to pass over bar and between the uprights for distances greater than ten feet or so. Point after touchdown kicks were never a certain thing.
Frank didn’t go to watch football.
The reason Frank attended football games as to watch the marching band.
Undoubtedly, the musical abilities of most of the band members were only marginally better than the football players’ skill at football. However, Frank granted them a certain amount of leeway because marching (particularly in some sinuous formation) while playing music had to be difficult. The occasional missed note, the more than occasional lack of tune or pitch was, in Frank’s mind, excusable.
Some days, when the weather was nice and Frank had the windows open in his room, he could hear the band practicing out on the field. What he heard was a bit minimalistic. Drums always carried across the distance, particularly rim shots when the drum line was marking cadence. Frank has varying success with picking out the other instruments. The volume shifted over time – perhaps as the players changed directions such that the bells of trumpets, for example, turned to face the wrong way.
Still, it was like a puzzle to try to catch the fleeting snippets of melody and fit them into a tune, it was amazing how many songs could end up sounding almost the same when you only heard perhaps ten percent of the music.
Each year, the band started practicing in the summer weeks before school opened. He could always tell when they were practicing because he would hear the distant, muffled sounds. Frank’s mom would usually let him run over to the school to watch the practices.
One day, something strange happened.
Frank could hear the band practicing, but when he got to the high school, no one was there. He checked the practice field that band usually used when the football team had the field for their practice. Nothing.
He checked the real football field, but the only thing he saw were some track team members running up and down the bleachers.
He even checked the band room, in case the band was inside, playing with the doors propped open. Still nothing.
Frank’s mom was a little surprised when he came back home after only ten minutes or so. He explained the mystery of the missing band. His mom knew that he enjoyed watching a listening to the band practices, so she decided to take a drive and find them. She asked Frank to check to make sure he could still hear the band – he ran up stairs to check and then ran right back down. Yes, they were still practicing.
“They must be practicing over at the middle school,” she said. “Let’s go find them!”
And off they went.
Only when they got to the middle school, there was no band.
They tried the elementary school. No band, just some little is playing soccer.
They tried driving around, going very slow, withe windows rolled down, listening for the band.
Nothing.
By the time they got back to the house, Frank couldn’t hear the band.
Mystery.
As summer drifted slowly (never slowly enough) toward the start of school, Frank heard the band that wasn’t there several more times. On days when nothing intervened, Frank and his mom would repeat the low-speed, window-rolled-down search for where the band was practicing.
Still nothing. Still a mystery. Frank’s mom called the The Phantom Band.
There was a pattern, of sorts, to the Phantom Band practices. Once he started keeping track, Frank noticed that the practices were always on a Tuesday or a Thursday and never started before 5:30. Frank’s mom suggested they be proactive and start driving and listening when the schedule suggested that the band might be playing.
It worked.
One Tuesday, they were in the car and had reached an area all the way beyond the middle school when they heard the band start playing. They could hear it well enough to pick out a general direction – but it seemed all wrong. Rather than point in the direction towards any one of the schools, the sound seemed to be coming from the other side of town.
It required some very careful listening and course correcting before they both felt they were closing in on the source. As they drove down a busy street lined with gas stations, donut shops and strip malls, the sound suddenly went from quite loud to much softer. They had passed it!
Frank couldn’t have explained zoning laws, but he did have sense that this was not the part of town where you would expect to see a school. His mom flipped around in the parking lot of a place that advertised tattoos and palm reading. She drove back, slowly, in the direction of the sound.
Off to the right was something like an American Legion or VFW hall, set back for the road and up a low rise to a parking lot. Frank’s mom drove up and into the parking lot. Now it was very easy to hear the band. Along the far side of the parking lot was a chain link fence and a backstop that looked like it was part of a baseball field. Along what might be the first base side, there were a set of bleachers.
And in the bleachers was a band.
As soon as the car came to a stop, Frank hopped out and ran toward the fence. He noticed two things almost immediately. For one, no one in the band was in high school. They were … Frank was about to think that they were old when he caught himself; some of them were younger than his mom. But however old they were, they were too old to still be in school.
The other thing he noticed was that these people played loud. Not bad loud, good loud. Real loud. And they played well, no obvious flubbed notes and they all seemed to be in tune. These were impressive in Frank’s mind.
The third thing he noticed, right behind the first two, was *what* they were playing.
They were playing “Hail to the Redskins”.
Mystery solved!
Frank and his mom had found – not s phantom band – but where the Redskins band practiced. He draped his arms over the fence and just listened for a while. His mom got out of the car and came over to stand beside him. She didn’t act impatient or try to talk to Frank. She just listened. That was one f the things that Frank liked about his mom.
A little later the practice ended and people started climbing down from the bleachers and walking towards where Frank was standing. A really old guy (maybe as old as Frank’s Grandpa) came over, carrying a saxophone.
“How’d you like it?”
Frank told him he loved it.
“You play an instrument?”
Frank said that he played piano and French horn. The man laughed.
“Don’t have much need for the piano, but you come back in a couple of years. That brass section,” he reached out and thumped the arm of another band member as he walked by with a trumpet, “needs all the help they can get.” Both men laughed.
The saxophone player talked to Frank and his mom for quite a while. Frank asked a lot of questions and learned a lot about playing in their band.
“You want to play in a professional football team’s marching band,” he said, “you don’t have a lot of choice; they are only two marching bands in the entire NFL and we’re one of them.”
Frank thought about that, then asked, “Which team has the other one?”
“I’ll never tell,” the man laughed, walking away, “you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”
