White fences, beautiful barns and horses were the first thing I saw from the window of our plane as it prepared for landing.  My husband often jokes that one of the reasons he married me was that I told him my family owned a horse farm.  I lived NEAR a horse farm but that was as far as it went.  In the airport, a store selling bourbon caught our eyes. Exiting the airport terminal we were met with beautiful green grass, some flowers still in bloom, trees in every color you can imagine and horses everywhere, on murals, wall borders and in the form of statues.

Our first stop was lunch at a place we knew served comfort food like fried green tomatoes, mac and cheese, fried chicken, catfish and cornbread.  A place where we ordered sweet tea and nobody blinked an eye.  At a round table near us, a group of older ladies sat having lunch, who with their teased white hair and beautiful etiquette exemplified the south.  And what’s a southern meal without homemade chocolate meringue pie?  It was as if we had died and gone to heaven.

After a much needed nap, we changed and headed out to an alumni band celebration for our college marching band director.  This is the place where my husband and I met, a place where memories were made with great friends, where I learned about work ethic and having high expectations not only from my college director, but first from my high school director.  I was very pleasantly surprised but not so surprised that that same high school director was there, as he and my college director have been friends for decades.

The room was full of people who were family.  Band family.  There’s nothing like it.  It doesn’t matter how old you are, what instrument you played, whether you stayed in music or not, once a member of the band family, always a member.  Despite the fact that I hadn’t seen some of these people in almost four decades, we greeted each other like the old days, meeting spouses like they were old friends.  We talked about different careers, children and grandchildren, but the one constant was our relationship to our band “dad”, the one who scared some of us, but who also demonstrated a kind of tough love because he cared for us and wanted us to experience excellence through this particular art form.

My husband and I sat with another trumpet player and his wife and it’s amazing how these two just fell into easy conversations, still laughing at the same things, exchanging affectionate but hysterical one-liners about memories with this director we were honoring for 50 years since he began directing the band.  There was mention of my husband among other directors who had taken what they had learned from these experiences into their own careers as college band directors, so that literally thousands of students were experiencing the same high expectations because of this one man.  We never realize how many people can be touched and positively changed by one person of integrity do we?

This morning my husband left for rehearsal to again experience what it felt like to march in front of an enthusiastic football crowd.  Even after having taught marching band for nearly 40 years, he was a little bit nervous – it’s a completely different thing to DO marching band, even when you teach it every day.  So on this stunningly beautiful fall afternoon, I’m going to Uber my way down to the stadium to sit with him in the same stadium where we played as teenagers and watch him play that same On, On U of K in front of that great football crowd for a great football game in the SEC.  A wonderful place where at any time you can hang out with your band family, see sweet ladies with teased white hair and order sweet tea.