PINTA PARADE

I am seated with my father and my Uncle in the football stands at Limestone High school. My cousin Amanda is aspiring to be a Drum major next year.  I have my glasses off. I have what may be my last meet tomorrow. Dad points out several of his former class students from Hollis. The filed looks like a piece of sheet music spattered horizontally over a sea of emerald felt. The lights are perched high overhead and yawning.

 I can still feel the chlorine on my body from twice a day workout sessions in the pool.

With my glasses off and folded inside my side pocket checkbook fashion the band is a aquatic  glob that seemingly pulsates and morphs ferrying diminutive brass stems. My father points out Amanda twice. Limestone is playing IVC and the band is performing a pregame show that includes Journey's Don't Stop Believing. I point to my father and tell him that I have several friends that are in the band including my friend Renae.

I use the word friend when describing them.

My cross-country season is all but punctuated. This is the first high school football game I have been to and it is not the school that I attend.

The game will be starting in fifteen minutes. The band egresses off the field in a sentence of limbs.

"Here, why don't you go down and say hi to your friends real quick." My father suggests. I am petrified. I don't know what I will do when I see Renae once again. I can't move. I can't believe that I am actually here at the stadium of the school I want to attend.

"Just go say hi to them," my father says, giving me a little shove."

I walk down from the top of the bleachers near the visitors end zone awaiting the bad.
Bodies are marching towards me. They are all in line. I am squinting, I am hoping to see the girl who last weekend I sat next to at the Rivermen game and endeavored to ask out only to find that the opportunity never availed itself, only to find that, at the end of the night I was in a strangers car being driven back to the only home I have ever known  with the girl I have been madly infatuated with next to my side. I see nothing. I am waiting near the end of the bleachers where the100 plus members of the band that has just finished christening the tip of their instruments in the center of the goal post.  I am waiting as what appear to be a modulating cadre in the fashioned of a Chinese dragon marches past me in a somewhat flagellating fashion. As the band members strut off the field they each swing their instrument and try to hit the middle of the upright The color blue continues top swarm around me. Limestone’s band adheres to the moniker of the Rockets and they continue to clang instruments as they march. They are walking back off the field as if they are troops. I am fully expecting David best to pull me over and signal security, asking me to leave the moment he sees me. There are several giggles. I hear someone say my voice and wonder if it perhaps might be my cousin. 

“Dave!!”

It is Kristi. She is in drum corps. She had five miniature drums arrayed out in front of her.

Kristie is still as gorgeous. Her hair is tucked beneath a blue Limestone rocket beret. I go to speak with her. I am still near sighted due the fact that my glasses are in my pocket. She lifts up her drum stick and points.

“The rest of the band is back there.”

Next I see Laura walking like a wounded battalion lugging her trombone.  She smiles and yells out my name like she is excited to see me as well.

No one ever yells out my name like they are excited to see me at Manual.

For a second I walk with Laura. She seems like she is worn out.  I wonder if Renae has called her at all over the past week and told her how awkward it was between us. I wonder if David Best  got to her. I don’t know who is coming next. There is an incessant freight train of band students dressed in military band garb walking in a sentence towards their place on the bleacher’s.

I want  to look back and find my Father and my Grandma and my Uncle Larry. 

While I am walking with Laura she points past me. She states the name of the creature I have been unremittingly seeking. She states that she will be excited that I asee her once again.

I am confused.

The I see her. She is by herself, carrying her clarinet as if it is a rifle.Even off the field she is still marching in 4/4 time

When she sees me see lets go of voice encasing my name. 

I walk up to her. She is in her Limestone Marching Rockets uniform.

I lasso my arms around her. I reel her in close.

I kiss her forehead.

I kiss it long.

                                                                   ***

 

I am seated next to  Renae with the section of the bleachers reservd for the Limestone band and she  is blushing. She is looking down at her Clarinet. She is holding it in both hands like she is about ready to give it head.I am the only person seated in the Limestone band section that is not wearing a military uniform or brandishing an instrument like a rifle. From the bleachers the illuminated field looks like a protracted Abacus. It is elongated locker room sheet music an two upsidown pitch forks planted 120 yards apart.  Helmeted high schoolers look ready to topple over in their armor.

I have failed with Angie LightHouse.  I have failed up to the expectations I have set for myself from the outset.

Tomorrow is my final cross-country meet.

I am still not 100 percent healed. I am still not fifty percent healed.

I am seated at a football game cheering for a school of a bunch of country kids in a district that nearly all of my family teaches for and finally, I feel like somehow I finally belong. 

Renae’s attire is navy blue and slips down to her ankles. Her waist seems to correlate to the neck of most of he peers.

"You look nice," I tell her.

.   Renae looks down into the top stem of her coronet like a bouquet and blushes.

I am lost at what to say. I want to apologize for the awkwardness of the last week. I want to tell her that I still think about her all the time.

Somehow Renae didn't ask what I was doing here when she saw me as she was walking off the field

 

“Listen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to confuse you at all. I think you’re a beautiful person. I’m really blessed to have you in my life.”

Before she can respond I am being reeled away. It is David Best.  I am fully expecting him to ostracize me for sitting with the Limestone band.

 

Instead he pulls me aside. He is happy to see me.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the other night. Larry was pulling my chain when I was talking to him on the phone and I guess I believed him more than I should of.”

I say the word larry with a question mark and then realize that he is talking about Renae's father.

"I'm sorry if I confused you or renae. You guys are really cute together."

David is acting nothing happened. Like our phone conversation the other night never transpired.

“Anyone bro, it’s good you are here.”

He is slapping me on the back. Suddenly we are Best friends again. Suddenly there are no rifts between us.

Suddenly all is well in the world.

I get Renae to stick her clarinet inside her mouth and offer a verbal quip about how she’s pretty good at sucking which invariably makes her blush. The colors of Renae’s cheeks is the sort of sunrise that cannot be described.

On the field IVC is ahead but Limestone is coming from behind.

All of a sudden I lose myself. All of a sudden I ask her.

"So do you wanna go out?” There is a pause. The sound of two palms pressed together in mid-clap anticipating connection.

I ask Renae, for the second time.

  .

“Yes,” She says. Somehow we are dating. Somehow she is my first official girlfriend.

I am walking out of Limestone stadium. In the Bleachers Renae is blowing into her instrument as if she is giving the reed head.  The lights are white and heavy.

I feel like telling Dad that I have connected with someone.

I feel like telling him that I have a girlfriend.

Life is good.