I’m not sure why it is but I often cannot watch a parade without my eyes welling up and, at times, tears run down my cheeks. Perhaps it is a mixture of nostalgia and some powerful feeling of pride and kinship, but when I see the American flag fluttering in the breeze as it passes by, followed by people marching in lock step to the rhythm of a drumbeat timed to brass trumpeting or a piper’s tempo, I go all queasy inside.

I’ve been marching in parades since joining Boy Scout Troop 157 in Brownsville, Brooklyn when I was 12 years old. These experiences began during World War II, and our scout troop Drum and Bugle Corps participated in the commemoration of the raising of plaques to the boys in the service in scores of neighborhoods. It was a matter of deep patriotic pride among the neighbors whose sons had enlisted or were drafted to serve in the Armed Forces.…

Read more: I Love a Parade

I’m not sure my father graduated from High School. He never told me. I think my mother graduated from Girls High in Brooklyn, but I’m not certain. She had come to New York in the hold of a ship from Russia with her mother, my Grandmother, who had six children in tow. My mother was three years old. My Grandfather had come a few years earlier to save enough money to bring them to the United States. It all happened in the waning days of the nineteenth century. That was the way it was done.

My father came to New York from London’s East End when he was ten years old. He was, I think, born in Poland and had come to England with my grandparents when he was eight months old. He rarely talked about his early childhood in London, but when he did he cited merely the names of boys with whom he had played.…

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