Niles Parade Fills a Life-Long Dream

A few years ago, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman chronicled their adventures in fulfilling a list of things to do before their demise in the movie The Bucket List. They saw the Great Pyramid, the Great Wall of China, and the Taj Mahal, parachuted out of an airplane, had dinner in France and laughed till they cried. Long before this movie, however, I too made my own bucket list, inspired not by the silver screen but by my daughter who has been steadily checking things off her list for twenty years (which given that she’s only twenty seven is an accomplishment in of itself).  

I recently had an opportunity to check off item number 38 thanks to the Village of Niles and Pam DeFiglio, editor of the Niles Patch.

In my younger years I marched in the Columbus Day and St. Patrick’s Day parades as trumpet player number seventeen in the St. Laurence HS band. It was great, but a marching band is all about precision and being in step and playing as many songs as possible without passing out. I always envied the guys who marched along as part of a float. Those fellows could wave to the crowd, go shake a few hands, smile and laugh and generally have a good old time of it. In late June, Pam sent out a request for Niles Patch writers and bloggers to support the site by marching with Pam in the Niles 4^th of July parade. Number 38 on my list was finally going to have his day.

Early, on the day of the parade, I lined up with all the other marchers in the north Notre Dame HS parking lot adjacent to Dempster St. The Patch.com space was somewhere next to the Shriner clowns, in front of the Guadalupe dancers and a little behind the lama and camel. Fortunately for us, both the lama and camel ended up further down stream in the parade order after we got going.

We set off down Ozark turning onto Main and made our way east to Harlem Ave. I blew up balloons and handed them out to the delight of the various groups of children. To the men and women I passed along pens, stickers and magnets promoting the Patch.com web site. To the many people smiling and waving and enjoying the parade, I wished them all a happy 4^th.

As I made my way ^along Main St. and down Harlem Ave., I began to notice how different many of the people looked from when I first moved to Niles some thirty years ago. Other than a young man of Native American heritage who I met doing one of the old Festival shows, I had nary seen a person of color. Granted, those young man eyes of mine were mostly focused on that young wife of mine but if memory serves me, the face of Niles was pretty monochrome. As I walked along in the parade, I saw that the new face of our village includes African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Arabs.  Our immigrant population is made up of people from parts of the world far more exotic than our little corner of America. We have representatives from the former Soviet Bloc nations, the Middle East, Central and South America, Asia and Africa.

However, looking at all the smiles on the parade route, I thought that maybe the face of Niles might be changing, but the heart remains the same. People from the homes that they worked so hard to win came out on a beautiful morning, gathered and lined the streets to celebrate what America is all about: lots of flag waving, pride of city, school and country, a free balloon or two, and a comfortable lawn chair. And joy. The joy of a life filled with freedom, so that no matter what color or nationality or religion you are, in this country you are free to gather without fear, free to cheer and clap and laugh, free to enjoy your neighbors and free to have a hot dog or two and watch your children run in the sun.

Thanks to Pam I had the opportunity I looked for in high school, and thanks to the Village of Niles I had the opportunity to do so in my hometown parade. Number 38 is now history. Now it’s on to number 39 - write a novel, 40 – sing the National Anthem at a baseball game, 41 – set up a rain barrel, no wait, I did that one, 42 – win the Pulitzer Prize, 43….