July 4th - by Sebatian Lindsay-Johnson

It’s been less than 24 hours since my last parade with the Burlington Teen Tour Band.  The feeling is, shall we say, interesting, confusing and all around strange.  It’s the Salvador Dali of feelings with Pollock-esqe splinters of random shifts in energy.

It was a steamy day in the rolling green hills of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  The city emerges from the great hills so suddenly its very essence seems  foreign,  it’s a tourist’s buffet filled with every conceivable form of dependable entertainment known to our kind.  It’s a great deal like our own Niagara Falls; only here the mountains rule over all.

When night fell, the infinite beaming lights shone like a great fluorescent scare through the mountains. As we loaded the busses to head down the short road to the Downtown, the fact soon began to emerge that this was the last time I would be preparing for a parade, no more of the hurry up and wait mentality, well that is not until I arrived home. Perhaps this is the reason why there are these strange feelings in my head; nothing as of yet has been final.

The sun, as it set that night, set not only upon the city.  It set, quite literally upon my time marching parades with this band, this organization that has been the single most long lasting and impressionable institution upon my admittedly young existence.  ‘How could this not be strange’ I find myself asking myself now, often out loud, startling those around me. 

We began and ended the smooth midnight parade with Strike up the Band, a good omen I should think, setting in motion the beginning of a whole new parade order of my life, I have to believe in this metaphor, weak as it may be.  It’s become a thought process, ‘memorize the order or die by the hands of Bennett!’ the section leaders would yell. Migod!

 Well there is no order to memorize now, now it’s all on me, a crazy and scary thought.  I am however, comforted by the notion that: You can quit the band any time you want my friends, but you can never really leave. Quite literally the Hotel California of Canadian marching bands, and I don’t find anything strange in that.