Parades + Memories

There are brothers of blood and then there are those that are forged out of something entirely different.

Parades always bring me back to another life. While you may see kids, dancers and high school bands I see into the past like some kind of timer traveler. I remember marching on Coronado Island in 1990 or it could have been 1991. We were to march no matter what but it just so happened that a huge team of horses were to our front. Just think of what the road might look like. I avoid every single obstacle block after block, our captain did not. It was hard not to laugh as he was marking time right in a large pile.

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This parade reminded me of Crow today. We had this cassette tape of old Irish drinking songs that we listened to maybe a thousand times while driving around. The music and all these people claiming to be Irish had my head swirling.

So many adventures. We were sent to Hokkaido for cold weather training, which was miserable. There isn’t anything worse than the cold, you go between miserable and frozen day after day. All of us were sent to do home visits with the locals. Somehow Crow was able to bridge the language barrier and carry on a conversation. For some reason I remember this scene, it was about football.

We had so many adventures. We stumbled upon this cave on base in Japan. There were signed stating the area was off limits but, as you can see, we really didn’t pay any attention to that. We viewed those signs as an invitation to make this our own spot where we spent many nights.

Pretty sure they were looking down in this deep hole in the cave floor which Crow happened to fall into one night. You know… caves get dark. A dozen or so staples in his head and he was ready to go!

We had need seen each other in maybe 20 years but it was like no time had passed.

It is funny how certain things can trigger a flood of past memories.

I sometimes think I should practice mindfulness, to stay in the here and now. Sometimes I love taking these journeys way into the past and reliving some of the best days. While not every day was sunshine and rainbows those days, I am forever grateful for Crow.