Weekend Assignment #267 : A Parade in Town

Late again! I had a topic all planned out, but a Tucson Toros game, lots of photos to edit and excessive sleepiness delayed its implementation. Much later, I remembered that this is Memorial Day weekend, and that I have this week's assignment, minus last week's responses, saved to draft. Here it is.

Weekend Assignment #267: In some communities, Memorial Day is celebrated in part by a local parade. Have you ever appeared in a parade, or at least attended one? Details, please! Note that I'm asking about any parade, not just a Memorial Day one.
Extra Credit: Have you ever studied to play a band instrument? (No band camp jokes, please.)

I've written about Memorial Day before, for John Scalzi's old Monday Photo Shoot. That was several years ago, though. Let me take another stab at the subject, before expanding to include other Parades I Have Known:

I grew up in a house on Fayetteville-Manlius road, about a mile outside the Village of Manlius, NY, roughly two miles from the Village of Fayetteville in the other direction. Both villages were in the Town of Manlius. Fayetteville and Manlius both had annual Memorial Day parades, and at one time or another I was in both of them.

The main parade for me was the Manlius one. I'm sure I marched in it as a Junior Girl Scout. Many years later I was in it again, carrying a non-functioning rifle in front of the high school band. I had a baton, but never really learned to twirl it very well. I just don't have the dexterity for something like that. Nor did I ever get good enough on the clarinet back in fifth grade to join the school band. Getting braces on my teeth was my ticket to dropping clarinet lessons, which I accepted gratefully. Anyway, my task was simply to march in time, which was challenging enough for me. The highlight was always at the corner of Fayette Street and Seneca, where one could usually see an exposed cobblestone or two and a bit of the old trolley track from the turn of the 20th Century, when a streetcar carried people from Syracuse all the way to Suburban Park.

Even if I wasn't in the Memorial Day Parade in Manlius, I always attended it. If my family didn't drive, I'd probably walk into the village, and stand somewhere near the former elementary school, Temple's Dairy Store and Sno Top. Temple's would sell pinwheels, vendors sold little flags, and Sno Top would sell twist cones dipped in chocolate on its "humdinger" opening weekend. Besides the scouts and the school bands, the parade itself always featured a vintage carload or two of World War I vets, marching World War II vets in the VFW (my dad, a former POW, was never part of such things), and the volunteer fire department, including my seventh grade social studies teacher, Thomas Murphy Hennigan. It wasn't the most exciting parade in the world, but it was a community event, something that drew us all together for an hour or so.

One year - and only one year - my mom took me to a Thanksgiving Parade in downtown Syracuse. I think kids' host Denny Sullivan was associated with it in some fashion, and I know I got one of those balloons with a shaped balloon (Mickey Mouse?) inside a clear round one. That's all I remember about it.

Disney's Electrical Parade at California Adventure, July 3, 2003.

I never got to the Columbus Day Parade in Syracuse, the Martin Luther King Day Parade in Tucson, or any parade at all in Columbus or Florida. My post-Manlius parades have all been at the Disney parks - Disneyland, California Adventure and Walt Disney World. And I like them very much, yes I do!

How about you? Did you grow up with one parade or another, or only get to one as an adult? Are you parade memories of community events, or the big holiday parades on tv, or commercial parades at them parks? Tell us about it! Write it up in your blog, and please remember to include a link back to this entry. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with the results. Here, meanwhile, is last week's results:

For Weekend Assignment #267 : 30 Years Ago, I asked for your recollections of the late 1970s, or the late 1980s if you're too young for the 1970s. Here are excerpts from the replies:


Julie said...

The 1970s era was sharply divided between high school and college. I've blocked out a lot of my high school years, though I still keep up with a few good folks from that era. College was much better, especially after I switched majors. My counselor at high school pretty much forced me into a business major in hopes that I'd find a nice fellow business major who would take care of me and lead me to a life of bland suburban bliss. I had other plans, and switched my major the first week of school.

Florinda said...

30 years ago this week, I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida with my parents and younger sister, and I was nearing the end of my freshman year of high school. The fact that I still remember my class schedule from back then may have something to do with my inability now to remember what I walked into the room intending to do - I have an extreme case of Brain Clutter. So let me share some of that clutter with you:

Mike said...

After doing a little math, I figured out I was in 4th grade 30 years ago. It wasn't my best year in school. Not that I remember a whole lot, I just know that I got screwed with my teacher. My brother is three years older than me, and when he was in fourth grade he loved his teacher. I guess she was really nice and helpful. So I was looking forward to it over the summer. Then the bad news came. That teacher left, but that wasn't the worst part. The replacement was my old nemesis from kindergarten.

I'm still dangerously low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE email me some new ones. I warn you, I will continue adding another please to the previous sentence each week until someone suggests something. Save us from the invasion of the pleases!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #267 : 30 Years Ago

I actually posted a completely different Weekend Assignment earlier today, but for reasons you'll see next week, I was jumping the gun with my topic. Starting over:

Weekend Assignment #267: On Tuesday, John and I will have been married to 30 years. If you're old enough to remember the late 1970s, please tell us what you were up to way back then. If not, pretend I asked about the late 1980s. If you're too young to that, I'll be very surprised, but go ahead and tell me about your life in the late 1990s!

Extra Credit: What, in your opinion, was the best thing about the 1970s, if anything?

May 19th, 1979 was exactly one week after my supposed graduation from Syracuse University, and my last day as a resident of metropolitan Syracuse, NY. I had been living in a studio apartment in an old house on Westcott Street, with a puppy named Jenny and a perpetually large phone bill from calling John in Columbus Ohio. Although I'd attended graduation the previous Saturday, I actually had four or five incompletes in my courses, all in my major, English. I later completed the requirements for the Romantic Lit course, only to discover, years later, that the professor never turned in the revised grade before retiring.

In 1979, I was completely stuck on my first novel, still called The Tengrem Sword; I couldn't seem to break through past page 70. I had been dieting my way into the wedding gown my friend d was making from a Middle Ages-based pattern. I allowed myself one Hershey bar a day, and yes, I still made my weight goal.


John was in town in the run up to the wedding, and so were my mom and John's mother and sister. The rehearsal dinner was at Faegan's Pub, which specialized in quiche and salad. I no longer remember whether it was on the wedding day or the day before that someone's car was accidentally locked with the keys inside. I was the one who calmly phoned a locksmith.

Music at the wedding was Mozart, played on an organ. I don't think there was music at the reception. If there had been, it would have been the Beatles, the main area of musical agreement before John and me.

After the reception we drove off in John's 1964 Ford Falcon van, which had a leaky transmission. Our honeymoon was spent at rainy state parks in New York and maybe Pennsylvania, trying to light a campfire. One of the stops was the grave of Samuel Clemens as you can see to the right. The denim jacket was my big purcase that spring. I arrived at the reception with this jacket over my wedding dress.

Good times.

You know, culturally, I was never that fond of the 1970s. I hated disco, the Beatles didn't get back together, and the clothes and hair...well, I did like my light blue jeans with all the extra pockets, but that's about it. I suppose the best thing culturally was the return of Star Trek as a series of movies, even if the first one was a bit of a dud, and the first Star Wars film. For me personally, though, the best thing was going to a writer's workshop in 1977, meetings a guy there, and ending up married to him less than two years later!

How about you? Do you have any personal or cultural memories of the era, or the decade after that? Tell us about it in your blog along with a link to this entry, and then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with excerpts from your responses. Like this:

For Weekend Assignment #266: TV That Mattered, I asked whether there was a tv show from your childhood that you remember especially fondly. Here are excerpts from the replies.

Pat (DesLily) said in comments...

my son saw the new [Star Trek] movie and said he was very pleased with it! This from a big original trek fan (plus all that followed).

by the time Trek came on tv I was already married with kids! In my day the only thing kids got to watch were mainly westerns like the Lone Ranger and Gene Autry.

Florinda said...

WKRP in Cincinnati made me want to work in the radio business. I thought I wanted a program-director's job like Andy Travis', but I think what I really would have liked was a position more like music director. WKRP was one of the first shows I remember that used current, recognizable music regularly as part of the show, but its selections weren't entirely true-to-life - many of them were much more likely to turn up on music-focused FM stations than on AM ones that still included farm reports in their programming. Obviously, my career didn't go in that direction, but my continuing interests in the business sides of both the radio and music industries can be directly traced to WKRP.

Julie said...

Star Trek is probably the obvious choice, so I'll skip that one and go for The Twilight Zone. That is one of the few prime time television programs that I remember from my early childhood, other than Gunsmoke. It was a show that stuck with me, though, and even as a child I appreciated the good storytelling.

Mike said...

One show I watched all the time, and still do, is M*A*S*H. Since this show was on forever I watched it as a combination of reruns and first run episodes. I clearly remember recording (on a Betamax!) the finale for my mom since it was her bowling night. I believe I was in eighth grade then, so it was okay to leave me alone, don't go calling the cops on her.

I'm still dangerously low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE email me some new ones. I warn you, I will continue adding another please to the previous sentence each week until someone suggests something. Save us from the invasion of the pleases!

Karen