What Memorial Day means to me

When I was little on the Sunday before Memorial Day my dad's friend I will call Jim threw a party.

All these guys who graduated from Niles high school were there.

Their wives came with them.

And so did their children.

My dad would wake me up early in the morning. I was very excited for Memorial it was like a spring christmas in my little head.

We would get dressed. He would make breakfast and we would leave. We would go to his one friend's house and pick him up. Then we would go to Cicero's Market and pick up the meat to put on the spit.

Then we would go to Jim's house.

Jim had at least six acres and a good sized house. He made good money working for Chevy.

Pretty much everyone there worked for Chevy in some way.

At Jim's was a keg and a lot of booze. I wold randomly drink beer throughout the day. My dad didn't care. He thought it was funny.

Around twelve people started showing up.

The party would get started.

All the wives brought something they made, pork and beans, spaghetti salad, a traditional potluck dinner.

Everyone would bring their dirt bikes and four wheelers and ride them around.

Jim for some reason would have a tractor with a trailer with hay in it. We would ride around the neighborhood in the trailer. The adults would be drunk laying there in the hay.

The men would stand around the spit talking about the sixties before they were married. Each telling a story of when they got drunk and something funny happened.

The women would sit around at picnic tables under umbrellas bullshitting endlessly about the bosses at the Chevy plants.

All the children would have to go up to each adult and give a record of their last year's achievements. What sports they played, how their grades were.

When 7 came around the adults were all drunk and started fighting with each other.

But this isn't a good memory:

One year, and it is recorded on video I wouldn't stand and take a picture. So my mother brutally beat me, slapping me in the face and screaming horrible things at me in front of everyone.

One time Jim's kid and another asshole's kid started shit with me and I had to beat them up.

And to finish it off, I found out later in my life that my dad invited his friend Wendel who is black and was mentioned in Blue Collar Boy to come and eat. Wendel came and everyone bitched at my father and hated him for awhile.