POLAND — Donald Dutil seized his walker with one hand, gripping its metal frame with a fist to keep himself upright. With the other hand, he waved.

And the music began.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” rang through the Poland Spring Inn hall. The 35-piece band, “Fanfare,” bounced through the anthem. About 200 people stood, many holding their hands over their hearts.

But Dutil saw none of them.

For two years — since diabetes stole his eyesight — the longtime conductor has been leading weekly concerts in the dark.

“You can almost feel your way through it,” said Dutil, who spends most of his time in a wheelchair. “There’s not one piece of music that I conduct the same way twice in a row.”

And he relies on his still-sharp recollection.

“I have to memorize everything,” he said. Every entrance, time-signature and cut-off relies on him.

The rest resides in the trust of his band, who wouldn’t let him quit.

“I was ready to hang it up a couple of years ago,” said Dutil, 65. “If I’d have done that, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be dead.”

“They said, ‘You’re going to get up and conduct just like you always have, and give us direction and we’ll follow it,’” he said.

“Those are the kind of musicians I have,” he said.

Dutil’s life as a musician began when he was 10, when he discovered a trumpet in his attic.

He learned to play from a second-hand instruction book. By the time he reached college after a short stint in the Army, he was skilled enough to enroll in the Northern Conservatory of Music, a Bangor school that has since closed.

He graduated in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in musical education. The next fell, he began teaching at Sacopee Valley High School in Hiram.

“I started there with one kid who played,” he said. When he left almost 30 years later, the instrumental program had 130 students.

On the side, he was picking up gigs as a trumpeter when the job came up at the Poland Spring Inn. He joined in 1990. A few months later, its director left and asked Dutil to step up.

Dutil never missed a concert until his diabetes struck.

When the disease attacked his feet — requiring surgery to prevent amputation — he agreed to skip a show.

“It almost broke my heart that I missed that one,” he said.

Dutil’s wife, Linda, recalled another time he left a hospital bed to perform at the Inn.

“The needle was still in his arm,” she said. “When the concert was over, he went back to the hospital.”

Trumpeter Duncan Webster believes Dutil’s force of personality has nurtured the band all of these years.

“When Don took this band over, it had about a dozen people,” said Webster. “Because Don is who he is, he has attracted the best musicians in southern Maine.

“He’s made them into a family,” he said.

Dutil said he is unsure how long he’ll be able to keep going. Besides all of his other health issues, his kidneys are failing. He now endures dialysis three times a week. It has weakened him.

He praised his wife for her care.

“There’s my wife and my music,” he said. “This is what keeps me going.”

He plans to finish the inn’s season, which ends in September. Then, he’ll decide what to do.

Until then, he’ll rely on the band’s faith to get by.

“I tell them, ‘You keep one eye on the music and one eye on me and it’s going to work,’” he said.

“And it does,” he said.

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