By NANCY JANE KERN
THIS MEMORIAL DAY weekend there will be parades, barbecues, and family celebrations and the drumbeats penetrate our souls. I have been in so many parades I want to grab my old cornet, don my Ockawamick School band uniform, and march into the line. Parade music is irresistible, and John Philip Sousa knew how to get us moving. Irving Berlin’s (possibly borrowed from Scott Joplin’s notes) “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” is an old favorite. We used to crank up my grandmother’s antique cylinder record player and tap our feet or high step around the living room.
There was an Allis Chalmers bulldozer on our farm, so I thought it was Allis Chalmers Ragtime Band, but that was okay, I eventually got it right after entertaining the adults who thought this was an interesting variation of the title.
Unless you have all the training you do not realize how much work goes into a parade. We had a good ex-navy band teacher who took us out on the football field and spent hours training us to stay in step and line, and coordinate turns. The real trick was in addition to all this you had to play the small sheet music that kept trying to fly out of the lyre which held it clamped above the horn. My hat would slide down over my eyes unless I stuffed something under the band, and the heavy wool uniform was murder on a hot day. With help from my father, I learned to make a proper knot for the tie.
Finally, we would march through Hudson in high spirits while stepping over the horse droppings and trying to spot our family along the streets. We were pretty good, and the hours of practice paid off.
One year someone tossed a firecracker into the sousaphone bell, and it added another bit of excitement. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the horn was not damaged.
Sometimes we got to play taps at the flagpole in Philmont at a more solemn ceremony and stood with our local veterans and admired their varied uniforms. In those years the reality of war and what it meant to us had not been absorbed. It takes time and experience to gain this.
Stories from family members came to us as we matured. A very old neighbor’s father had witnessed a friend’s eyes sucked out by a passing cannonball during the Civil War. That made a sobering impression as well as one about a great-great grandfather’s near death from dysentery at a southern prison camp in Louisiana.
A great uncle was at Verdun in WWI; several were shot down over Germany in WWII and one fortunately survived and returned from a concentration camp.
Then Vietnam brought it all very close to home with the loss of friends and the physical and especially the psychological damage to those who made it back.
In the 1980s, I visited the American Cemetery at Verdun in France on the eve of Maundy Thursday. It was an overwhelming experience to stand alone with my niece on the steps of the chapel and look out over the rows and rows of thousands of white grave markers. It was green and mowed to perfection with birds singing nearby. It was hard to comprehend the horrors that had occurred there while looking at scenes of beauty along the peaceful riverbanks. Remnants of concrete bunkers and fortresses are everywhere adjacent to the roads. Not far away is a cemetery of the German soldiers. It was overgrown with weeds and brush and had only a small path trodden down by possibly family members visiting from over the border. It is another grim contrast, and those families also remember and grieve.
War is so hard to comprehend. Many go through experiences we will never understand and wish never to experience for ourselves. We feel immense gratitude to all our military for maintaining our freedom. As the drums beat we stand, remember, and salute you.
