MAKING GOD LAUGH !!!

            I am convinced God has a sense of humor.  There are examples all around us:  the Puffer Fish, the Platypus, Matt Taylor’s physique.  It would not be a stretch to believe God lets us experience sudden distractions at the worst possible moment to amuse himself.  Sorta like, “Well Jim seems to be doing pretty good today, let’s throw him a curveball and see how he handles it!”  Those days always seem to be competition days.  You know, the day I am already in my best possible mood.  Small examples of these phenomena would include:

            I’m standing outside the Liberty Bowl. I am about to go up and change into the obligatory suit when some one runs up and says, “Mr. Smith, come quick, Christian Bahniuk is unconscious!”  That is never a good thing to hear an hour before warm up.  It seems that Christian had slipped in the restroom and hit her head on the concrete floor.  I got there about the same time as the paramedics and the stretcher.  She ended up surviving (she spent most of her time hitting on a cute EMT).  God chuckled.

            The bus for Dayton leaves in less than an hour going to the WGI World Drum Championships.  Eric Jackson (snare drummer) is horsing around outside the band room and breaks his leg.  No trip for Eric but, while I stomp around growling and muttering, God grins.

            We are in Dayton for WGI World Drum Championships and it is time to get in line to perform.  I send wonderful parents Vicki and Hal Schneider out to the truck to get the battery.  For those of you who do not know, the battery is everyone in a drum line that does not play in the front ensemble.  With time getting really tight, Hal comes back with the truck battery.  Really????.........   God snorts.

            I take the band to Jackson, TN to play in the West Tennessee Concert Festival (mid 1990’s).  When we start to unload, we discover that someone has left the music in my office at the school.  That someone is me.  God guffaws. 

            The most extreme example of this sort of thing happened coming home from one of our first victories in the Vanderbilt marching competition.  Parents give us their children to take out of town with the expectation that we will return safely with all of them.  Not long after leaving Nashville, I got a call from Mr. Wilson to tell me that they could not find Keith Hamilton and asking if he was on my bus.  He wasn’t, so we pulled over and searched all of the buses.  No Keith to be found.  We called his cell phone and got no answer.  One of his friends told me they had seen Keith talking with girls from Siegel at their bus just before we left.  Somewhere in here I called the Tennessee Highway Patrol and Keith’s parents.  His parents had not heard from him.  The Highway Patrol offered to send someone to Siegel High School to meet their buses in the event Keith had found a girl who would talk to him (a very unlikely scenario) and gotten on her bus.  Keith’s dad started back toward Vanderbilt from Germantown to look for Keith.  Eventually, we started for home. 

            When we pull up in the parking lot, Keith’s very distraught mom met us with no news of Keith.  I calmed her down as best I could and turned to go back and get my stuff off of the bus.  As I looked up, here comes Keith walking toward me, draped in a blanket and without a care in the world.  After throwing him in a headlock and taking him to his mom, I got this story.  It would seem that Keith, tired from all that talking with the girls from Siegel, had gotten on his bus in a different seat.  He had turned off his phone, covered himself up with a blanket, and gone to sleep.  Evidently no one looked under the blanket when they searched.  It took me a while to find the humor in what happened.  God, however, is still laughing.