D.C.’s Memorial Day Parade Is Special, but Also One of Many

Every year, people on a special day are drawn to the long blocks of Constitution Avenue.  People come in families, or singly, or two-by-two, they come from all over the country and the world, and from the past, standing, sitting by the curbs, under the lavishness of trees offering cover from the sun, they come against the backdrop of the big monuments, the historic places not far away, the home of the president, and the president frozen as sculpture.  Not far away is Lincoln, is the World War II Memorial, is the shiny dark wall of names called the Viet Nam Memorial, is the Korean War memorial, is the FDR memorial, is the lonely World War I memorial.

It was once again National Memorial Day in Washington, and people gathered for the annual National Memorial Day Parade.

The National Memorial Day Parade is different here, of course, because of all that history, articulated in time and space every day here.   But if you close your eyes, or see only some things, and hear the music, the marching bands,  you might hear the everywhere of this occasion.  In hundreds and thousands of places all across these United States, everyone is doing some version of the same thing, big and small, elaborate and as simple as a baby carriages and tanks, batons flung high in the air, everywhere.

It is, I think, helpful to think of the parade that way, as one among the many, not so much the most important one, but the one here and now amidst all these memorials and memories, about the fallen soldiers, about the men and women who encapsulate the heart, the soul and idea of service to country.  The parade, here in history land, tells us that Americans have been sacrificing, persevering and fighting on this soil and the sod and sand of lands around the world for a long time.  This country was born as an idea, but created in the aftermath of war.

In the long Memorial Day Week, the parade is powerfully old fashioned and all at once both minuscule and grand.  After the roar of Rolling Thunder, the solemnity of speeches and the ceremonials, presidential and military at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the parade is a kind of bas relief commemorating the lives lost and the battles fought—but also the why of it all, home and hearth, guns and roses, those absent and those present  here on earth.

Perhaps the commonest of ingredients in this Memorial Day—presented on a warm Washington day, full of deft breezes—are the bands—those marching bands from all over, including here (Ballou) to assumedly distant schools chosen who saved up for the trip.

So, these musical bands—the flag-waving girls, the trombones, the bandleaders, the drummers and the furried hats, stepping high—came from where we all come from: home.  From Hampton High School, Pennsylvania,  the Ohio School for the Blind Marching Band,  the Franklin High School Band from Pennsylvania,  the Secaucus High School Band from New Jersey, the West Platte High School Band, from Missouri, the Shiner High School Band from Texas, the Bartow High School Band from Florida, the Henry Ford Marching Band from Michigan, the Pride of Morristown Marching Band from Indiana, the Deer Park High School Band from Texas, the Gateway High School Band from Pennsylvania,  the Mulberry High School Band from Florida,  the Springfield Marching Band from Massachusetts, the Cumberland Valley High School Band from Pennsylvania, the Havelock High School Band from South Carolina, the Kennedy Marching Band from Michigan the Ocoee Marching Band from Florida, the Mariposa Unified Grizzly High School Band from California,  the Childon High School Band from Pennsylvania, the Liberty Technology Magnet High School Band from Tennessee  and the Everett High School Band from Massachusetts.

Marching  bands are the core ingredients of parades, especially at Memorial Day Parades—they’re about tomorrow, tomorrow, which a young princess type was singing on the curb.  They, more than anybody, are the reasons soldiers end up sacrificing and go off to wars.

There were other things in passing—that parade of soldiers from all our wars—who knew there were so many—the pointed hats and fifes of the Revolution, the bunched up dark blue of the Union soldiers and the musicians as Confederates, who did not play Dixie, Buffalo soldiers and young boys dressed like doughboys, and the dwindling veterans of World War II, riding in classic cars, waving a wave to cheerful, heartfelt applause and the carload of men in World War II bomber jackets, jaunty caps and wave, the essence of greatest generation flyboy cool, and there was music, the Smashing Pumpkins and a country star and special guest, actor Joe Mantegna, who plays a serial killer hunter on television’s “Criminal Minds,” but who was here in honor of his uncle WWII vet Willy Novelli.

There was a Washington Nationals float, and the running presidents were there—and is it just me or is the Abe guy beginning to look more and more like Bryce Harper?

Someone who looked like General Black Jack Pershing was there, and military dignitaries of lofty rank were there, and women dressed in the bustled dresses of the Civil War, and jeeps from the big one, still seeming to smell like gasoline came by, and the riderless black horse,  and an ace from the Viet Nam War, and folks playing music of the 1940s, as it mixed in with our most hallowed songs—“God Bless America,” indeed, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  It was not so much martial, but our way of living, then and now, that was coming by, right before our eyes. 

You could imagine this happening everywhere across the country—small towns by a lake, in the suburbs, way out West, in the Rust Belt and the oceanside places along the Gulf and the magnolia streets of the South.  

You can imagine, as batons spin high into the air, the sun catching them bright and confident. You can imagine all the losses that went into that moment, in the here and now, the wounds that were taken, the aftermath never gone, the different way life went because of them.