I think, everyone remembers that first time they spend a significant amount of time away from home.  I’m not talking about a weekend sleepover at a friends, or even a week at summer camp.  I’m talking about months at a time, thousands of miles away from home.  Mine didn’t occur till rather later in life.  I was 20 and turned 21 during my extended adventure.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I hung around close to home my entire life.  I still hadn’t gone to college yet, so that was soon to come.  As a youngster, I did travel quite a bit through drum corp, but it was an activity that my parents were always involved in, so it never really felt like I was away from home.  Being away from home means more than just leaving the house you physically live in.  What it really means is, leaving your family and friends behind.

That happened for me for the first time in January of 1983.  It was to be my last year of drum corp, and I was travelling to Boston, Massachetutes to join the 27th Lancers.  This was a twelve hour drive from where I lived in Canada, so probably about 700 miles.  So, maybe thousands was an exagerration.  But, I would be there for an incredibly long time.  From January till the end of August.  That’s usually the end of a drum corp season.

Trying to decide which story to tell is a little bit tough here.  Not that there aren’t man, beleive me, there were lots.  When I first moved there, I lived in the suburb of Revere with two other guys and a girl.  We live in a little three story walk-up above some slightly crazy people.  They lady below used to complain constantly about our music and that we were making wierd noises to try and drive her crazy.  Personally I think she was already there.  One day, her son attacked one of my room mates as we made our way down the stairs to go to the laundrymat.  The son even then called the ppolice to report himself.  Craziness was heridatary in that family for sure.

Then there was the time, I was with eight or ten buddies spending a day at Revere beach.  It was jut before summer, and we were getting into the usual young person trouble.  Drinking and smoking on the beach were all fun and games, till a couple of bodies floated up on the beach.  Creepy huh?  One of them lived and one of them died.  Apparently they had been out fishing the night before and fell overboard.  Police and ambulances showed up of course.  Kinda of crazy when your already breaking a number of laws on a public beach.  Not as crazy as the foam coming out of the one guys mouth, which I saw from the crowd. Yeeech!

That’s just a couple of the stories from that eight month adventure.  But the rest will have to wait for another post.