New Tradition on Memorial Day?

I don't have a lot of Memorial Day traditions. I know that most people do. Cookouts, parades, parties, and 3-day weekend family get-togethers. I suppose that I used to do all of those of those things on the holiday (especially when I was teaching school band and orchestra), but, I've gotten away from it all recently for some reasons more obvious than others. 

One of my favorite memories from Memorial Day weekend is from when I was teaching school in Michigan. Most band directors in Michigan do a Memorial Day parade on the holiday. Since the villages of Ovid and Elsie share a school district in the open farm land of mid-Michigan, as the band director at Ovid-Elsie High School, the students and I did two parades. One in each small village. We made a day of it, stopping for a complimentary hot dog lunch at the Elsie VFW Hall in-between gigs (thanks again, everybody!). In fact, we did a third ceremony at a cemetery located about halfway between each village after both parades. I would take a small group of students out to perform at the cemetery and usually buy them ice cream afterwards. Needless to say, it was an exhausting day. More so for the kids than for me. They did all the work on the day, I merely helped with the preparations.

After the parades, I typically went over to my good friend (and OE Athletic Director) Rex Peckens' house for a cookout and hang. Rex and I became friends when I started at OE and have remained so ever since. At Rex's farm, there was food, drink, and family. Rex and I would usually find some time after eating to thrown around a baseball. A simple game of catch. Nothing fancy, but, it's certainly something that I can remember doing on warm Memorial Day afternoons and early evenings surrounded by corn fields in mid-Michigan.

When I moved with my family years later to Indianapolis, I remember playing catch (not necessarily on Memorial Day) with my neighbor and friend Robert Stapleton. Rob's a former baseball player and so trying to keep up with him in velocity and accuracy was a challenge for me, but, one that I enjoyed every time we strapped on the gloves to play.

Maybe it's not necessarily the tradition that I miss…it's the act of hanging with friends with nothing else on our collective plates that I would like to continue. 

So, this past Memorial Day I happened to be in Miami at port. My friend from Indianapolis, Jen, was also there on a business trip. She and a friend were staying at the South Beach Hilton turning the work weekend into a belated birthday celebration for Jen. Since I was in port for the day, Jen invited me over to hang by the pool with them for the afternoon. It was an awesome time. Weather was beautiful and sunny. We sat by the pool, sipping champagne mixed with pineapple juice, eating frozen grapes and fruit plates. We swapped stories and swam a little bit spending the afternoon laying around in the south Florida sun. Not a bad way to spend Memorial Day. 

Seems like I got some of my Memorial Day tradition this year after all. Not bad. Not bad at all.