Memorial Day

I went to the Sea Cliff Memorial Day Parade today.  I have been going to this parade each year since 1985.  Before 1985 I knew about the parade but I never bothered to go to it.  Then a colleague of mine from work wrote a piece for the newspaper called "A Memorial for Memorial Days Past."  It was about how, growing up in Maine, Leslie would go to all the Memorial Day parades in his town.  Years later he went back, the the parade no longer existed, and he mourned that no one cared anymore.  That year I attended the parade in Sea Cliff for the first time, and I have never missed one since.  This is Scott, a Green Beret who served in Vietnam, and who has been at these Memorial Day remembrances much longer than I have been.

Here the parade, headed by two Boy Scouts carrying flags, and followed by the honor guard marches down Sea Cliff Avenue, the main street in town.

The wonderful thing about this parade is that various groups in town march in the parade - in this case, the Sea Cliff Civic Association, including a baby stroller and a tyke on a bike!

Here a young boy, on the shoulders of his dad, waves the small American flag given to him.

And this is a different view of the parade, where you can see the rest of the parade stretching out into the distance, behind the leaders.

After the parade, I went to a memorial in a park right next to where we first lived when we came to Sea Cliff.  Way back then, the flag was not painted, and this monument was known as "The Headless Statue," which is funny because it is a column, not a statue.  It was finally painted 30 years ago.  It is a monument to a young man of 21, from Sea Cliff,  who died in 1898 "in the war for the freedom of Cuba."