Thursday, January 1, 2009

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Where does the time go?

Today is our nephew Timmy's 10th birthday ... in thinking about how quickly he and his cousins are growing up, something related to our marching days occurred to me.

Timmy is some six months older than Karen was at our first rehearsal in July 1967.

Timmy is still a kid!

In discussing this with Karen yesterday, she remembers little about being that age: her Twiggy lunch box, a trip we took to California that summer, a couple other things.

While Karen is two years younger than I am, she was by no means the youngest kid in the corps then nor at any other time. I can still remember Goober hanging out at rehearsals while still too young to march - if my math is right, he was all of 7 years old when we started, and many of us thought he should have been allowed to join when Mickey and Peaches did.

There was an awful lot expected of us back in the day, from drills to guard work to music. Add to that keeping track of everything we needed for parades, competitions, and tours - uniforms, snacks, changes of clothes, sleeping bags. I know adults who still don't have the skills we took for granted back then.

How did we learn to do all that and keep track of everything, especially given that none of the original members had ever marched before? After all, most of us were on our own, our parents not with us during our corps time.

Is Timmy old enough to do what we did? We'll never know.

All for now - corpsdially yours from jo!

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