Labor Day motorcycle parade

Nothing like a race against time to get the old heart rate up.
I hadn’t planned on stimulating my heart, but I did plan a tight schedule for getting from Middlebury, Ind. to South Bend, Ind. after church to a picnic with my nephew and his family Labor Day weekend.
We would have made it, too – if the Sunday morning message hadn’t gone over, if the kids hadn’t needed to change before we left, if we hadn’t had to pick up and drop off stuff before we got there. But we did have to do all that.
By the time we hit the by-pass we knew we would be 20 to 30 minutes late. But hey! 20, even 30 minutes most people will wait that long.
We sped down the four-lane around the twin cities until, just after the off-ramp, a police car blocked our path. Dozens of motorcyclists hummed up the ramp on the right and down the ramp on the left. Some carried rippling flags.
How long could a parade of cyclists last? We waited and watched until someone said, “I think they’re circling around.” We headed for the side streets of Mishawaka, Ind. planning to re-enter the by-pass a couple exits later and be 30 or 40 minutes late to the picnic.
It would have worked, if it hadn’t been for the police car and bearded, gray-haired motorcyclist who said, “You can’t get on here.”
Behind him motorcycles flowed down both sides of the highway. It was not a parade.
“How far does this go?”
“To the airport.”
Twenty miles of by-pass filled with motorcycle riders?!
“What is this for anyway?”
“MDA.” The bearded one said.
Oh yeah, Labor Day fund raisers for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. A good cause complicated our plans for a family picnic. That meant traversing the streets of the twin cities to the picnic and guaranteed we would be an hour late. No one waits more than an hour to meet someone, but we would stop by the park just to be sure and then head for their house to make our apologies. I pulled out a novel, put on my specs and began reading to block out the stress of about mandatory traffic stops on deserted streets on a Sunday afternoon.
An hour late we pulled into the park – just as my nephew and his wife and kids set a couple of boxes of chicken on a picnic table. So they had tired of waiting, bought their own picnic food were getting ready to eat without us. We rushed over, picnic baskets in hand, overflowing with apologies.
Apologies were not needed. They had been stuck on the east end of the park waiting on the passage of hundreds and thousands of motorcycles making their way through the city to the four-lane.
It was awesome, until they realized they were not going to be 15 minutes or 30 minutes late, but an hour late to the picnic. They knew no one waits an hour for anyone. About the time they decided to go home and see if we had called, the parade of cyclists ended. They rushed over to the park just in case.
Hearts racing, overflowing with apologies, we all had converged on the park an hour late. The only people we waited on that day were the motorcycle riders with their flags doing a good deed done for MDA.