Home Town Champions

I live in a fairly small town. It’s a quiet place, with local businesses mostly not open on Sundays, and closing weeknights by 9pm on Main Street, with sidewalks rolling up not long after.  The only thing open later is a local pub or two, the five gas stations, and our one supermarket. We’re a suburb to Maine’s largest city. We like our quite and enjoy our peaceful existence. Every so often, we cut loose, and do so with much noise and merriment.

We boast about 8000 residents, and graduate a whopping 150 or so 17-20 year olds into the greater world on an annual basis, with the vast majority going to college, and most of those to nationally ranked top schools…a good share to Ivy League-level colleges. We celebrate education (and are willing to pay for it), and are a pretty tight-knit community. At our noisiest, we salute our graduates as they head out of town on busses to their Project Graduation post-graduation event (an alcohol & drug-free all-nighter that takes them to various places in the area to celebrate their accomplishment). Families and townspeople line the streets, blow horns, shoot off a cannon or two, and scream well wishes to the kids as they head out.

During their years of matriculation here, we laud student athletes with rides on the float during our annual festival (Clamfest, where our tiny town entertains well over 100,000 people over a 3 day event), and have noisy escorts into town when any team wins a championship. Those escorts include the team members on a bus or two, police vehicles and off duty fire trucks with sirens blaring and a string of cars of friends and family and sports enthusiasts that watched the win following along down the winding parade toward their return to the local school.

Tonight was one such night. I was at my desk, quietly texting with my adult kids on “remember to bring your long johns/it’s snowing in Maine” for their pilgrimage home for Christmas. I hear the sirens in the near distance and then mightily as they cruise down Main Street…just a few hundred feet from our front door. Cruiser after cruiser, fire trucks, and a line of vehicles. I can see the lights shining through the window blinds and take a mental check on what team might be playing on a Sunday night and have had a championship tonight. Not ski team. Not hockey.  Wondering who it might be. The sounds aren’t making their normal turn toward the schools, and I open the blinds to take a look at the procession. Then it occurs to me; this is a championship team of an entirely different nature.

This is to honor, not so much celebrate, but truly honor a group of people who gave their all on the field. Tears come to my eyes as I recite names I know…humbled at their efforts on my, and your, behalf. This is the caravan of wreaths that will be laid at Arlington this year. Wreaths Across America, making their way from Bangor, Maine to Arlington, VA to the waiting hands of hundreds of other volunteers who will lovingly place the wreaths on the tombstones of those buried at Arlington, calling out each individual’s name as they lay the wreath….remembering each soul for their ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. I know some of the volunteers who will lay the wreaths; I have a son currently serving in the military, and our bond of families of servicemembers is a strong one.

I’m guessing the Wreath caravan has passed through my town each and every year, but in 20 years here, this is the first one I’ve witnessed. I took some quick photos, snapped horridly through an upstairs window with screening on it…so they’re fuzzy at best. But, the next town over has a great video from a camera mounted in one of the escort vehicles. Here’s that video:

It isn’t lost on me that I expected a celebration of hometown champions, and what I witnessed was the honoring of national champions…of our freedom, our democracy, our ability to have small towns that lend the ability to have normally quiet and peaceful lives. Thank you to those that lay in Arlington and other cemeteries across the United States and on foreign shores and waters worldwide. You and your families have given all of us a pretty big gift. I’m glad you’re being remembered at Christmas.