When I began planning this extended vacation in California, I saw that the Santa Clara Vanguard birthday dinner was last Sunday, so I anchored the end of my trip around that. I spent my last two nights in CA at my Vanguard buddy, Erik’s apartment in San Francisco.

Someone said that our actions only make sense in retrospect. I had just spent four months contorting myself to fit into a job where I clearly did not. What I wanted to do most (now that I had time to do anything and enough savings to cover my previous level of expenses for about three months and Em’s encouragement) was to reconnect with people and places that reminded me of who I was.

I had briefly seen Erik once or twice at drum corps shows over the years. Aside from that, I hadn’t been in contact with him since my age-out year of 2003. The first night of my stay the other day, I arrived late in the evening (around 10:40), and we caught up a bit about what we had been up to in life and work. Much of his work and volunteer experience has revolved around teaching and software and Vanguard. He taught high school for two years, he worked at YouTube doing sales, I think, and hated it, and he taught at Vanguard on the side. Recently, he went to a startup training type place where he learned software engineering, and now he is a mentor to current students there.

The next day, Erik had a few gatherings with his friends, so I explored Golden Gate Park a little bit in the morning and then spent the next three hours navigating public transit to Santa Clara for the birthday dinner.

The event was a mixed bag. Overall, I was glad I went. I also left slightly before the end of it in order to get back to SF at a reasonable time, which I think was also the right decision. I was surprised to see barely anybody I knew there. I greeted the current acting director, Charlie, who aged out with me in 2003 and a bass drummer named Chris, who busted his leg in 2001 or 2002 and then hobbled around for the rest of the season. Charlie was happy to see me but couldn’t talk long because he had to prepare his speech. Chris was really excited, as I was, to see another person from our era. I introduced myself to a table of recent alumni who didn’t really seem to want to interact much outside of their group, which I understood. And I talked with Veronica and Jo from the volunteer crew. Veronica is also on the board, so she talked some inside baseball with me. For the most part, it seemed that the representation there was about 40% alumni from the 70s, 25% alumni from the past year or two, and 23% parents. So alumni of my era were barely represented. Veronica pointed out that in the 70s, the corps was all local, so many of them are still around as they always have been. Em pointed out that the alumni who are my age are probably all having babies now.

The corps has had the event at a local Six Flags amusement park the past two years, which allows for more capacity, slightly better acoustics, and better audio / video equipment (they live streamed the event this year). The drawbacks though are that it feels a little more corporate and that the size of the room allows for some side conversations to distract from the speaking program and that the venue is absent of the charm with which the corps hall is overflowing – the painted silhouette of the Fiddler, the wire armature on the chair which enabled the Phantom to disappear at the end of the show in 1989, and photos lining the walls.

Charlie got a bit choked up when he addressed the audience as corps director. He said something about what an honor it was to be standing in front of the organization that contributed so much to who he is as a person. Many other people said things, which is about all I remembered from those presentations. The director of the cadet corps (essentially the junior corps of the Vanguard, made up of mostly high school age members) held a moment of silence for two people in the organization who passed away in the past year – someone I didn’t know and Myron Rosander, who was the heart of the organization for circa 40 years. The cadet corps and the A corps hornlines played parts of their shows. The A corps also played an excerpt from The Canyon, which they will be playing, not in their show, but during encore performances this year. They both sounded and looked pretty good overall despite some rough edges, which are to be expected at this point in the season.

Then the hornline did a slow motion ripple, which meant that they were about to play Send in the Clowns, and along with that realization, a wave of nausea rushed over me. This song means everything to us. It’s the last song we played at encore performances. It’s the last song we played at the end of the season. We played it once for a fleet driver whose brother had passed away during tour. We played it for Myron on his birthday in 2001, and he was so moved that he had to brace himself against a chain link fence to keep himself upright. I’m not sure, but I hope the corps played it for Myron at the memorial service they had for him. Someone I marched with in 2003 said that she decided to audition for the corps because she heard us play Send in the Clowns at a show in Arizona in 2001. Send in the Clowns is how the Vanguard says goodbye.

I hadn’t heard them play it in probably 10 years. Myron said something to us once about how, years down the road, we wouldn’t think about the Vanguard every day – that was hard to imagine at the time, but it happened. That song has lost none of its impact though. If anything, it only means more the further removed one’s day to day life is from the organization. I looked up to see the director of the Tournament of Roses Parade (who doesn’t really have a close connection to the Vanguard) weeping along with everyone else.

Then there were SCV hall of fame inductions. One involved a son who marched long ago presenting the award to his dad, a very active volunteer who built, advocated for, and / or conceived of many things for the early and scrappy Vanguard, including the first souvenir booth, the bus fleet (which I think I rode on), the first food truck, the corps hall, and so on. That was interesting to hear the stories of how many of these pieces of crucial equipment that we took for granted came to be, and the volunteers in general have a mostly underrecognized existence, so it seemed deserving to acknowledge this volunteer so significantly. The other three hall of fame inductees were drummers from the 70s. One thing I appreciated about them was that they all thanked and recognize many of their peers and instructors – they all paid homage to this guy named Tony in the audience, who was apparently the godfather of SCV percussion technique and a professor at San Jose State, I think. The thing I didn’t appreciate was that each of the drummers had an excessive introduction followed by an even more excessive acceptance speech that was built on a “you had to be there” approach. The last one went on for about 20 minutes. At minute 15 or so, it seemed it was about to wrap up, and the guy (Tom Brown, I think it was – a drummer from that time, himself) who introduced the speaker picked up the award to hand it to the guy, but then the speech took another turn, and the introducer subtly set the award back on the table because he didn’t want to hold it for that long. That’s when I bolted to catch the slightly earlier train back to San Francisco.

I got back to Erik’s place around 11 pm after missing a bus (I was on the wrong side of the street and realized it just a bit too late), so I felt bad for maybe keeping him up late again. Erik wasn’t concerned about it. He had recently returned from an Oscars viewing party and wanted to hear about how the birthday dinner went, so I told him, and we stayed up late talking about ways to engage alumni of our age and the impact of Myron and the notes that Myron left on the rehearsal field at the end of every year and how Erik wished he had legible photos of each of those letters, which I told him I did (for the three years I marched, anyway) and how much I documented and if I could find that documentation and Dylan (Myron’s protege) and when Dylan left and the guy who replaced Dylan and how Erik became known as the guy who couldn’t stand Dylan’s replacement, which we all felt, but he embodied and how when Dylan told us he was leaving, he just announced it and turned around to walk off, but we wouldn’t let him go without marching 8s and 8s with him one last time and how Erik said it was like losing a family member, which was so appropriate and how the next time I saw Dylan and he was teaching at a young corps in Oregon and how he introduced me to one of his 16-year-old students and said that he was going to be a bad ass one day, which I knew he would be because Dylan wouldn’t let him not be because he believed in him the way he believed in all of us and how there have been so many subsequent years of the Vanguard since us and how they all probably had very different experiences like how we probably had different experiences from the people who marched a few years before us but actually I read a book ten years ago that this guy who marched in the 90s wrote about Vanguard and I was struck by how similar it was to my experience and how that all really stemmed from Myron and Erik said,

If I could impact just one life the way that Myron impacted so many…

I mentioned the constant pain that we have of wanting to still be there marching but not being able to. Erik reframed it as wanting to be able to contribute to the next generation in the same way. Erik wondered if he had ever impacted someone the way that Dylan impacted him. I said maybe he had but just didn’t know it.

The memories and the emotions that we don’t often revisit flowed out of us. Later, I thought about the year after I aged out and I was teaching as a lead visual instructor at a local high school, which was Dylan’s role at my high school, and I heard Dylan’s words coming out of my mouth and saw the students respond the way I responded to Dylan and I felt connected to something greater than all of us that passed through Gail Royer, the founding director of the Vanguard to Myron to Dylan to me and many others to who-knows-who-else in that group of students. I saw from a different perspective that intangible sense that all of the Vanguard alumni (including Dylan) who taught at my high school marching band had – that secret that they knew that made me want to follow them.

So Erik reminded me that teaching or mentoring gave me a sense of purpose that nothing else has.