Dream
I can only remember one dream from the last few nights. I was in a band room right before a concert. Call time had come and gone, and minutes before the downbeat were in the single digits. My uniform was in good order, a buttoned jacket and straight, black bow tie over a shirt so clean and white and crisp it shone. I was kneeling over a battered, silver tuba. It looked like an instrument called Juicy, one of the two pitiful specimens in the Decatur High band room. At my side was a small, frightened boy. He was nearly in tears. This was his tuba.
Perhaps the law said it belonged to the school, the district, or the state, but any tuba player would have told you it was the sole property of the panicked kid beside me on the floor. The broken-down horn had practically taught him how to play. Through it, he gained a rich, commanding voice that no one could ignore. Hauling it around made him strong. The tuba had changed things, and the boy had come to love it. I didn't dream any of this, his story, but I saw it in his eyes. The horn could have broken spontaneously. School tubas have a way of doing just that for no mechanically explicable reason at the most inconvenient times. Maybe he made one of those mistakes that occur so often in the first few months of learning to handle such big instruments. Perhaps someone else vandalized it or hurt it accidentally and he was as angry as he was scared and sad. I don't remember the tug at my sleeve or hearing him call my name, the garbled, incoherent explanation and plea for help.
All I can recall is kneeling beside him, my hands darting over the valves. I bound something with a bit of wire. I forced something back into its proper shape. I remember his fear: that he wouldn't get to play. This was his first concert, and his mother, his father, someone he loved was in the house. If the tuba didn't sound, he would remember the evening as an embarrassment, not a triumph. The person who had come to hear him play might not know the difference, but he would. I remember hoping his eyes were on my fingers, that he was learning how to do this for himself. Even in dreams, I know it's senior year.
I never looked down at my vest to see whose colors I wore. It was unimportant. The tuba I repaired was likely one at Decatur High. The boy was dressed in the uniform of the Beginning Band of Durham School of the Arts. It didn't matter where I was. Horns are horns, a stage is a stage, and concerts and upset, first year tuba players are the same everywhere. At whatever school, in Durham, in Decatur, in China, or on the moon, I was performing one of those concert night miracles that have almost become routine. The same adrenaline was speeding my hands. The same ice water was flowing in my veins. I was perfectly confident in my own ability to fix this, to keep the section at full strength, to save the show for one kid as someone once did for me.