Page 7 - 2019 Senior Will

Leanna Carroll ~~
“In these coming years, many things will change, but the way I feel will remain the same.”
– Panic! At the Disco, The End of All Things
This is the truth, it’s finally here, isn’t it? There for a time I wasn’t sure that I would get here. There were threats of giving up, of letting go of band to focus on other things, even brief and minor threats of giving up on college altogether, but here we are at the end of the road, or rather, at a fork in the road. This is a time for me to decide where to go from here, and I am afraid and excited for myself. But as I sit here, writing my senior will the night before the fall semester begins, I am compelled to reflect on my time in the University of Delaware Marching Band, and give my thoughts and sentiments for the two people that will probably read this.
Yes, I am making this far too serious on purpose. Here goes. Confessions
So, the truth is that I never wanted to do Marching Band. Whether you find that surprising or unsurprising is up to you. I hadn’t even wanted to do it in high school. I was forced to go to an introductory thing in the middle of the summer when I was fourteen and would have rather been doing anything else honestly. I sulked into the band room, which, at the beginning of my high school career at Polytech High School in 2012, was in an old auto tech classroom with leaking pipes and 100-year-old carpet, and I sat down. Minutes later, I was accosted by an eccentric girl with a saxophone neck strap around her neck and a million excited words in the span of about a minute. The rest of the afternoon went similarly, as I was struck by the excitement of these people who I mildly feared (because I was coming out of middle school and everything sucks when you’re in middle school, particularly in Kent County, Delaware), and simply by mere curiosity, I came out of the day feeling like I was going to continue my first ever research project in the behavior of the bando.
The rest is history. Here I am, 8 years later and still, I don’t know everything. I am hopeless to explain the love-hate relationship I have with Marching Band, or why I become so frustrated I cry and get pulled over for speeding at 11pm after a full day of band camp and get off with a warning because I am so hysterical, and then come back to band camp the next day with renewed energy and excitement for the day. I am not nearly enough of a sociologist to explain the relationship of a bando with their director, other bandos, their instrument, or even their band as a whole. After telling someone who has never been in band everything that we do, they often ask why I do it. My answer is always the same: I don’t know, because only a bando can experience the feeling of being a part of something so unlike anything else. It’s really astonishing the commitment and the energy that one must keep up to be a part of it. A great sense of responsibility that makes everything work. Even after all of the times I come out of a rehearsal, sweaty and agitated or freezing and fatigued, I am here, at the end of my research to say: I love marching band, dammit, and I always will.
To conclude this segment and get to the good stuff, I want to thank everyone who I have been in band with over the years, for just being there. Just existing long enough for me to have people around me, so I could say stupid and weird things and at least one person will laugh, most likely out