I'm headed to Oklahoma later this week. I'll be there for OU's homecoming football game. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Pride of Oklahoma marching band. They're having a large-scale gathering of alumni, and I'm on my way.

I was in the Pride from 1986 to 1989. My freshman season was the band that was awarded the Sudler Trophy, leading us to label everything with a "Sudler" prefix in the 1987 season. It was like the '60's Batman utility belt, only with better music. I went to two Orange Bowls and a Citrus Bowl before the 1989 recruitment scandal led to NCAA suspension and Barry Switzer's resignation. Those trips also meant three trips to New Orleans the days right after New Year's. Not to mention New Year's Day usually spent on the Florida beaches. It was a pretty good couple of years.

Well, mostly. This would be years before my thyroid problem was diagnosed, before my depression was diagnosed. Looking back on it, I can see now that a lot of what I went through, a lot of the negative, was due at least in part to that. Not all, mind you. Somehow I angered my section leader my freshman year (and don't ask how– I don't know, nor could any of my friends figure it out either) which made that year really tough, and made me appear to the rest of the band leadership as a troublemaker. Even by my senior year, there were people in the band who would rather see me not there at all. But I made it through the auditions year after year. I was no where near the top of the heap in the French Horn section; right around the time I enrolled at OU, they had gotten a number of exceedingly good hornists. Any ensemble that only needed 2-4 horns was pretty much a lost cause to the rest of us. And I wasn't even a music major, so I was no where near the running. But for the Pride, which took 24 horns, I could make it. And I had friends there, and I had a love for the band that wouldn't let me give in to the people who didn't like me. But I have to take some part of the responsibility, even if I didn't fully understand why at the time.

So, I haven't been back since 1990. When I lived in Colorado, it would have been trivial, but the hard feelings were still too fresh. I was bearing a huge grudge over the harder parts of those four years. If I stayed away, I could keep the happier moments and go off of those. But something happened a while back to change my views: I went to my 10-year high school reunion (in 1996). When I did that, I went back with the intention of gloating about my success over those who'd shunned me and snubbed me in high school (I mean, I was not only a band geek in high school, I was a computer geek before computers were commonplace). But at the reunion, I realized that a lot of the silly divisions from high school no longer existed. See, I had gone to the event expecting to show them how I'd changed, matured, and gotten past all of the crap of high school. I just hadn't given any of them credit for doing the same. By the time I left Oklahoma on that trip, I had a much better outlook on things, because there was less grudge-weight slowing me down.

Which brings me to this upcoming weekend. To be fair, if it weren't a lot more involved to go back, now that I live in California, I probably would have by now. As it happens, I left Denver a few months after that reunion and moved out here. I might have gone to homecoming the very next year (going that year wasn't an option– I'd burned most of my available vacation time to visit my grandmother in the hospital, then later for her funeral). So it's just kind of fallen by they wayside until the special occassion of this year. And I could very easily go into this with the same sort of approach I took to the '96 reunion; there will no doubt be at least a few people there who would prefer I never darken the halls of the OU band office again. But I'm not going out there for them, not to see them nor to prove anything to them. I'm going out there because I'm itching to see the band march, and because of the names I've seen on the confirmed roster. There are a lot of names I'd hoped to see, that I hold out hope will show up anyway (or at least be around the general area of the game on Saturday).

I'm looking forward to this trip with a level of excitement and anticipation that I honestly didn't think I was capable of, anymore. It's weird, and it's a little cool.