I had to do this in chunks. I couldn't handle doing all of this in one night.
I know these are usually done in video form, but just go with it. (And, yes, I know this is almost four months late, but just bear with me...)
Without further ado, here it is: the missing week.
By the end of the trip, I had seen both sides of 2 a.m., each leaving me utterly exhausted and with an overwhelming want to crawl right back into bed.
We had to meet at school at 3 in the morning on Sunday. It was dark, obviously, when I made the all-too familiar trek from one of the back parking lots to the door of the band room. Unlike the outside, inside was lively, bright, and buzzing, packed to the brim with kids, parents, and luggage. So much luggage...
More or less, we arrived in Hawai'i several hours later. I have to say that we all tweaked out a little bit when we walked off the plane and it was freakishly warm outside. I mean, if you came from a place that was less than 40 degrees Fahrenheit and walked into a place that was almost twice that, you wouldn't believe it was December, either. It could have been the middle of August for us. We received the traditional welcome lei and met our amazingly spectacular tour guide, Jermaine (aside from the chaperones, the trip would not have gone nearly as smoothly if it weren't for him...also probably one of the nicest people I've ever met).
That afternoon, we had practice in a park a few blocks away from the hotel, playing through everything that we would be playing at the Arizona memorial the next day.
There was one particular song, though, that was giving us a bit of trouble. We played through it a couple of times, and it sounded pretty good. But we were missing something.
"Emotion," our director said. He explained the significance of this song, this event. At random, he asked the band if anybody had some sort of connection to the military. Ninety percent of the kids in my band had a parent/relative/sibling/friend serving in the armed forces.
"Play for them," he said. "This song is for them, and for those who are no longer around to hear it. We're here to recognize them."
We rose early the next morning, had breakfast (the restaurant where we had breakfast every morning was amazing...they quite literally served everything for breakfast...we weren't there enough days to be able to try everything) and headed off to the Arizona memorial park.
You get to the park, and you realize that something's different. Something in the air...even though it's 80 degrees and sunny, there's something dark and sinister behind all of the memorabilia being sold in the shops nearby. It happened on a day just like the one right now: sunny, quiet, a perfect day in paradise. Who would've though there would be an attack on a small base in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But there was, despite the claims that there were warnings about an attack, yet they were disregarded. Men were sent off shore the night before, thought many decided to return in order to be able to rise early for their duties the next morning.
And, well, you know the rest.
Contrary to what I wrote earlier, we didn't actually perform on the memorial per se, but we set up on one of the lawns facing the memorial inside the park.
It was early in the morning, a little before nine 'clock, so there weren't a lot of people there just yet. But there were still people there, it being, like, two days before the big anniversary.
I knew this was going to be different from the Rose Parade in how important these performances were, what they meant to me and the people around me. Rose Parade was for ourselves, for the people here and now. This was for the people who weren't there, who were unable to say good-bye to their shipmates except at funerals and memorials, who were there only in spirit, who still lay in the depths of the bay, preserved in their twenty-year-old selves, when their shipmates are well into their nineties.
We played a selection of songs at the memorial, including our parade rotation ("Americans We" and Elvis's "Burnin' Love/C.C. Rider Medley"), an Armed Forces salute, the Washington Post march, and "America the Beautiful".
Let me talk at you about that last one.
Remember that pep talk Grams gave us earlier? It worked out just fine.
I was in tears by the end of this song. Very few people weren't.
Some sort of divine intervention made that song what it was that day, and it's something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. Even though we couldn't see it, people told us after we performed that, at the key change in the song, when it starts to get really heavy, a rainbow appeared, stretching between us and the Arizona Memorial.
I've mentioned before on this blog that I lost my grandpa two years ago. He was a military man in his early years, joining the navy in order to get money from G.I. Bill so he could go to college, where he studied engineering and went on to work for the Federal Aviation Administration. But, once a military man, always a military man. My uncle, his son, also went on to serve his country for 26 years.
I owe a lot of who I am to my grandfather (not just because without him, my mom and, therefore I, wouldn't exist). He's the single person I can attribute my involvement in music to. When I was little, when we would go on car rides, he would play Vince Giuraldi tapes (he did the composing for the Charlie Brown cartoons on TV). "Linus and Lucy" was the song that inspired me to start playing music. Anyway, I would not have been standing there in Hawaii if it weren't for him.
And he didn't even know I was there. He didn't know I was going, what I was doing. But, in some ways, I think he did know, and he was there. And we made him proud.
Later that afternoon, we actually went onto the memorial. For how big our band was, we actually took up most of the boat going over to Ford Island (where all the ships were docked). So we basically had the memorial to ourselves.
There's nothing extravagant about it; it's not particularly ornamental or decorated. It's set up like a mausoleum. There are three chambers (though I refrain from saying those exact words because it's very open): an entrance that holds all the flags of the branches of the armed forces, the United States flag, the Hawaii state flag, as well as the state flags of the ships that were docked in Honolulu on the day of the attack. Then you enter a room that's completely open on the sides and on the ceiling. You can look out into the bay, and you can see the rusted gun turrets of the USS Arizona. If you look close enough, you can still see tiny droplets of oil surfacing (the legend is that when the last survivor of the Arizona dies and is laid to rest with his shipmates, the oil leak will stop). The last room of the memorial is the most haunting. It holds the most weight. I was taken aback by it. Spanning an entire wall (around 20 ft by 20 ft) were all the names of those who were trapped 20, 30, 40 ft below our feet. Over one thousand of them, never to see the sweet light of day ever again.
It's something we all take for granted sometimes, being able to wake up to a new morning and being able to do something in this world...and actually having a say in whether or not we get to do this. These men, some only a few years older than me, some who lied about their age so they could run off to serve their country, didn't get the chance to decide.
Did I mention it was absolutely silent the entire time we were at the memorial? You take a bunch of high schools kids to a historically significant site, one we'd all read about in our history books (those of us who actually did our reading that is) and you don't exactly expect them to be moved by it, to appreciate it, to be respectful of it. But when the 130+ kids stepped off that boat and onto the memorial, it was dead silent for the entire time we where there, except for the occasional whisper--someone pointing out the oil droplets in the water or pointing out a family name on the list of fatalities. I respect these kids so much, you have no idea.
Especially after, when I went back to memorial a few days later with just my mom, the people who went to the memorial with us were the polar opposite; they were talking about irrelevant things, being loud...all things that suggested they had everything but respect for the memorial, which made me very angry. But it also made me appreciate my band so much more.
Did I mention how much I love these kids?
So, sure, we did all the tourist-y things that I said we would (drove around to different beaches, the Banzai Pipeline, the Dole Pineapple Plantation, go to the Polynesians Cultural Center, one of the Macadamia Nut farms on the island).
Then we also had the parade on December 7th. What made it all the more interesting was that it was at night, something that few us us have actually experienced more (side note: I think there should be more night-time parades. Most parades we encounter are mid-morning. Society, let's change things up a bit. More parades in the p.m.!) That was another experience I will remember for the rest of my life. I marched the Rose Parade my sophomore year, and I will admit that I spent pretty much the entire parade trying not to die, to just make sure that I survived the parade. This one...I got to enjoy it a lot more. The energy form the crowd was amazing, marching down the fairy light-lit streets along the water, marching with survivors of the attack. We got to the end of the parade, and we couldn't feel more proud of ourselves. We gave everything we had, despite being sunburned and tired (one guy messed up his foot on the beach earlier that day, yet he still marched). After, we got to just relax and eat dinner in one of the parks and listen to the Marine Band perform and enjoy each other's company.
Then there's the maid story...in which my three roommates and I (and by that, I mean just me) made desperate attempts to keep the non-English-fluent maid out of our room (to almost no avail) because three of the four of us were in nothing but shorts and bras due to the immense heat and humidity. I guess she's walked in on worse things.
Have I also mentioned how many beautiful men there were in Hawaii? So gorgeous...and sooooo many...*drools*
We were stationed in the city for most of the trip. But I would hardly call Honolulu a city. There aren't any large skyscrapers. There's some mild traffic as you go farther away, but other than that...it's peaceful. I enjoyed getting to walk around the city (in sandals, no doubt) and watch the people...in swimsuits, just coming off the beach, in shorts and tank tops...just enjoying life. I think we could all learn a few lessons form the locals. I would definitely go back there. It'll be a little more relaxing, I'm sure.
It's the middle of April, and I'm finally finishing this up. I really did want to be able to properly document this, to say the things I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say them. As my year is drawing to a close, emotions are beginning to kick in, and I'm beginning to be able to come to term with...things. My time with this band is almost over. I'm truly thankful for the experiences I've been blessed with because of this program. I've learned so many lessons about the people around me...and myself.
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