The Road Comes to an End

Those were my thoughts as I drove to a friend's house on Friday night, where we would create a scrapbook to give to the director who is leaving the school due to recent budget cuts. As the four of us sat in the living room, organizing the album, we couldn't help but reminisce about the years we had spent with that director. It seems so long ago when I had my first rehearsal with her, trying to play something that sounded at least remotely like music. For five years she had taught my classmates and me. I began to think of all the wonderful moments created by the music program--joyful moments, crazy moments, angry moments, but wonderful moments. I'll never forget the night when my friends and I had to stay in a run-down hotel in Minneapolis after our flight from Florida (for a performance) was cancelled. I'll never forget those seemingly endless, muddy, mosquito-infested nights on the football field when our marching band would run through the show, trying to pefect it. I'll never forget summer school band, where I helped the enthusiastic middle school students rehearse for their concert. The music program has been a huge part of my life since middle school. I've met some incredible people through the program and it transformed me from the awkward, boring middle school student I was into a high school student with a social life. It's difficult to imagine that one of our directors, who basically raised us as musicians, will be leaving next year. I'm not afraid of change, but I am sentimental and she will be missed. What will my next two years in the program offer? They will, without doubt, be very different because of the budget cuts. However, the only direction in life is ahead and whatever happens next will happen next. The other two band directors will no longer be directly involved in the marching band. Because of the cut, they need to focus their energy on the curricular band program and the marching band simply will not fit into their busier schedule. We will have three entirely new marching band instructors this year, which is exciting in some ways but downright scary in others. I'm confident each of them will be qualified, but so much is still unkown about the situation that their is a lot of confusion. Only time will tell how the future of the program will turn out.