For These and All Thy Blessings...

Today is a day for remembering. But this isn't a story about the memories you might think I ought to be writing about today. 

At the head of a column of sweating and twitchy children clad in smothering black wool, gold piping, white epaulettes, smart white-topped hats, and gleaming white shoes, each of us asking the God of our own understanding to help us not drop our horn, or pants, or brains, there stood a man. He commanded the kind of respect from this marching, maturing, smelly, and slightly addled (on even the best of days) concoction of adolescence that might have rivaled the respect given Alexander the Great. This respect wasn't a product of intimidation, force, or compelled by fear. When this man looked into our faces , he met our gaze with kindness, and a twinkle in his eye that invited us to create, to learn a new way to play together. And that was the root of the respect we so rightly offered. The man was incredibly kind. 

This collection of unformed teenage angst, tensed with anticipation would have gone to the wall for this man; a man who ended our summers two weeks early, who ate up every Monday night of the fall semester, who made us wait to eat nachos until after halftime, who took us to Opryland that one time instead of DisneyWorld. We would have gone to the wall (and to whatever comes after the wall) for this man. 

Because he believed we could make beautiful music together, and because he showed us how, we believed him. He taught us how to walk, all over again. He taught us how to breathe, all over again. And then he taught us how to put all those things together. The man taught us to be good, very good at doing these things together. And he was proud. And he told us that we were special. He taught us about legacies, about being proud to so something well, all of us, all together. He told us we were good. We believed him. And we loved him so. 

As we rounded the last bus, which was parked all cattywompass, the waiting crowd roared to their feet, whether they really thought they liked us or not. The air rippled with Indian Summer fervor. The sound hit like a brick, bouncing off everything, knocking my brains and lungs somewhere into the soles of my feet. We had been warned about this sound. They all said it was for us. But we knew the sound was really for him. There would be none of this if not for him. And that noise, the kind of noise that is so loud you feel it inside your chest, continued to rise. It seemed to insist to us that we were indeed ready to do what the man had taught us. Instead of feeling pressure to be perfect, we seemed to settle into the noise, letting it polish us, one last time. We put ourselves entirely to the task at hand. 

And then the sound went dead. Vision tunneled. Everything seemed to hover and hum.  Babies and little kids even sat still. Grandmothers stopped digging in their bags for a hard candy. All the dads stopped flipping burgers outside of the concession stand. 

We sorted out into clumps and smaller lines and columns all along the sidelines. And then, the announcement...the salute...the sound off...and in a miracle of sound and fury, the pride of an entire county owned the joint, played their guts out, knocked UIL judges for loops, and made our parents weep with joy...and him, too.  And we were beautiful. Mighty. Slick. Famed. 

And we were his. And he was ours.

For many people, it would be easy enough to simply say that Butch Crudington taught band. But my God, how powerfully reductive that statement would be. He taught us the value of doing something together, of drawing on the things that we had in common, of making beautiful noise TOGETHER. He taught us to listen to each other, to balance each other out, to dress to the right, to roll from our heels to our toes so that our steps would be smooth and clean. And those lessons stick with a person, long after we left the band hall. Yes, he did teach band, but he taught us how to be good to each other, how to be good WITH each other, and dared us to BE GOOD, to be our best selves, to put all that work in motion.  And those are lessons that last a lifetime, that inform vocations, that help friendships last the tests of time and distance, that make us better partners, better teachers, better musicians, and better human beings. It's tempting to think of his baton as a kind of magic wand, a talisman, some kind of powerful tool that he used to bewitch us into being good.  But his hands, his eyes, his voice, and his very heart really did the hard work of teaching us. And those were simply miraculous. 

When my mother told me Mr. C had died, I thought about the legendary line spoken at Lincoln's deathbed, "Now, he belongs to the ages." I think that's just about right for my teacher, the man who stood at the head of a column of children, and taught them to be good. I also thought about the volumes of sound we put into the atmosphere with him, for him, and how some of those waves must surely still be bouncing and echoing off of the particles in the very highest stratosphere, maybe we even played loud enough for some of that noise to have gone into space. I imagine our best shows, our most perfect notes clinging to each other, streaming still, beauty extending and lengthening and rebounding off the very walls of creation.  And though my heart is heavy, that thought makes me smile. 

Childhood ends. We wade into adulthood, and spend decades sifting through what to keep and what to throw away from our formative years. I keep these memories. I memorize them the way I memorized the fight song--like my life depends on it. Learning to play together, to make something beautiful, to create, to perform, and to be proud are the root lessons of a life well lived. I am grateful to have been Mr. C's student. I'm grateful that he knew how loved and special he was to so many of us. We wrote him love letters twenty feet high, defacing public streets to proclaim our love and loyalty to him. And we can still tell him we love him every time we make music, every time we can walk across a room without falling down, every time we encourage those around us to be their best, and check our tuning. He knows as he is fully known. And that is more miracle than any of us could ask or imagine for our teacher and friend. 

May he rest in peace, and rise in glory. Thanks be to God. 

Mil besos,

rmgj