[This is just a piece of personal history, and I have written about much of it before, so…don’t bother if you have other things to do… but it is about two of life’s most important gifts…]
I think one reason I wanted to join the band so much when I was in 6th grade was that Darrel Guimond was in the band. He was my first best friend. We rode the school bus together. I liked being with him. It was such a different feeling, having a friend. There were things I could talk about with a friend that didn’t fit anywhere else. Until Darrel, I didn’t even know those things were waiting in my brain, waiting for someone to hear them.
He was a semester ahead of me, though. When we moved to Oakland City from Indianapolis, I was in first semester of 5th grade. Darrel was in 2nd sem. So we were not in the same classroom.
Then in the fall, Darrel was in 6th grade, while I was still in 5th. 6th was when band started, when kids first got instruments. Darrel got a cornet. He carried it back and forth on the school bus, in a black case. That was neat. It was a sign of belonging to something important, belonging to the band. But it created a gap between us. He was in the band, and I was not.
When I started 6th grade myself, I so much wanted to be in the band, but we had no money for an instrument. My sister, Mary V, remembered that Grandma Mac had bought a war bond for each of us. I cashed in my bond. It was enough to pay for a used metal clarinet. It was in a black case. Battered, but I got to carry it on the bus, the way Darrel carried his cornet.
When I got to high school, the band director didn’t want an old metal clarinet in the band. Clarinets were all black ebonite by then. So he assigned me to the vacant second bassoon chair. Bassoons were so expensive that the school bought and owned them. Because I could afford only the least expensive instrument, I got to play the most expensive one. It was in a really big black case that took up a lot of space on the bus.
I always wanted to… not so much be like Darrel, but to be with him. He was my friend. I’d never had a friend before. As a kid in Indianapolis, I played with Jimmy Mencin, from across the street, but we were playmates, not friends.
I wanted to belong, in general. To everything. Band was my first chance to start belonging. But I think Darrel was a reason, too. If we both belonged to band, we could spend time together.
We did that a lot. When he was editor of Oak Barks, the school newspaper, as a sr, I was asst ed as a jr. We played a lot of baseball and basketball and ping-pong at his house. We went to Forsythe church together and sang too loudly together. We tried to make sense of the strange words and the line drawings in the sex ed manual together. We ran around together, going to parties, just driving around and talking together. I was best man at his wedding.
He was always so confident. He just assumed he would be good at whatever he tried, and he was--sports and grades and girls--and especially playing the trumpet. I always assumed I would be bad at whatever I tried, and I was—sports and grades and girls—and especially playing the bassoon. It was nice to have a confident friend.
Then we lost touch. We stayed aware of each other, through mutual friends, but we didn’t see each other, even at class reunions, for we had been in different graduating classes. But I knew that he continued to be in the band, although he was an engineer by profession, playing in the famous Purdue Salty Dogs when he was in college, and in bands all over the world until he died.
The last time I saw him in person was at Mother’s visitation, 1998, at Corn Funeral Home in Oakland City. He had come from his home in Lancaster, PA to Ft. Branch, 15 miles from OC, to visit his mother, Kate, where she had moved to live with her sister after his father, Linus, died. He saw the notice of Mother’s visitation in the paper, so he came over. He had gained a lot of weight. I didn’t recognize him. This chubby older man started talking to me, though, like an old friend who would know who he was. It was both startling and relieving when I figured it out. He died ten years later.
At my 60 year class reunion, Butch Corn, younger brother of my classmate, Bobby Joe, gave me a CD of Darrel playing “Precious Lord…” on his trumpet. I play it whenever I need good memories. That is when my first best friend and I are together again. I think I’ll put it on right now. It’s always a good time to remember a friend.
John Robert McFarland
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