You drive in before dawn, with everything in sight dark but the well-lit bus. Someone usually tells you to park over to the side, because visitors will need the spaces close to the church during the day. You get out in the bitter cold, often with snow and ice underfoot, making sure you have all your children and they all have their coats, boots, books, snacks, and pillows.

You get on the bus, hoping you’d arrived early enough to get three sets of seats together near the front, and then deploy: mother with youngest child, father with second youngest, and the oldest two together, which may or may not work. You watch the Joneses get on, Mrs. Jones having prepared her children as if for D-Day, with military competence the other families on the bus can only envy.

Everyone Waits for the Smiths

Everyone waits in their seats for the Smiths, who will as they do every year, pour out of their van eight minutes after the bus was supposed to have left. When they finally get settled in their seats, after some seat-trading, often after other parents had ordered their own children to move from the good seats they had gotten because their own family had arrived on time, Mr. Smith will make at least one and maybe three trips back to the van to get things his children had forgotten, while Mrs. Smith apologizes, as she does every year.

Almost everyone then falls asleep, till about two hours later the bus stops for a quick breakfast. I would make private bets with myself about which Smith child would not get back on the bus afterward and have to be found by a surprisingly unworried father. We made the trip easier on our children by abolishing dietary restrictions for the day. They never surprised us by eating well anyway.

About two or three hours after that, the bus would drop us somewhere near the Ellipse in D.C., across from the White House, where we’d bunch together to listen to the opening talks, standing on snow or frozen ground or roadway. We stamped our feet a lot. We were usually early, because the good man who organized the bus liked being very early because he was that kind of person.

Not the Best Marchers

We were not, my family, the best marchers. In the first years we’d try to stay with our group but never could do it. Then we just started walking as a family. We walked faster than most people, so stayed to the side where we could get around the slower-moving.

After a few years, having realized that we did not want to freeze while watching a lot of politicians and churchmen say the same thing over and over from the platform, we started sneaking off to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, joining the march as it went by later. (I’m told the program is much improved these days.)

The march went all the way up Constitution Avenue and around the Capitol building to the steps of the Supreme Court, whose morally and legally bad decision in 1973 started the whole thing. It took a while but I can’t remember how long. For me it was one of those times when time slows down because you’re doing exactly what you ought to be doing, or maybe because you’re enjoying yourself.

Most of the other marchers were Catholics, but as the years went by more and more Evangelicals joined in. One year we found ourselves in the middle of a huge group of kids from Southern Baptist churches in Missouri. They would occasionally burst out in chants or hymns, and I will always remember walking in the middle of two or three-hundred young people singing “Amazing Grace.”

Some of the more outgoing kids asked us who we were. A very earnest young man, who admitted as he started talking that he’d grown up disliking the Catholic Church, explained to me that Catholics had defended unborn life from the beginning and then solemnly thanked me, apparently as a representative of the entire Catholic Church. I accepted his thanks on behalf of the Catholic Church.

The street rises as you get close to the capitol building and like many others, we would always turn around to look down the street at the blocks and blocks and blocks of marchers behind us. I was always surprised at how many people were there, how many had come from a long way away, and how many were young.

After the March

After the march we would slip off to the Air and Space Museum while our friends and comrades trooped off to hear aides to their senators or congressmen express their support, or else to stop at their offices to register support for pro-life legislation. We had a pro-life congressman and Senators Santorum or Toomey, who was sound, and the ghastly Senator Specter, who would remain pro-choice no matter what, and later Senator Casey, who would shame the memory of his great father, the pro-life governor of Pennsylvania. Airplanes and rockets were much cooler than politicians.

Our group would meet later that afternoon at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in northeast Washington, where we’d have Mass before getting back on the bus for the trip home. People would try to grab something to eat or something from the bookshop, and our leader would plead for people to get back on the bus on time, in the voice of someone who knew he was asking for the moon.

One year our youngest, both absent-minded and curious, wandered off to look at something. I still remember how kind everyone was as we looked for him, even though they all desperately wanted to get on the bus and go home.

On the way back, someone would play a family-friendly movie, often the same movie as previous years. (This is the source of my enduring dislike of the movie Rudy.) I thought of organizing a bus promising adult entertainment but that would have been misunderstood.

Several hours later the bus would pull into the again dark church parking lot, where we’d all stumble out of the bus and into our frigid cold cars. The Jones children would be as organized as they began, the Smith children too tired not to walk straight to the car. We’d usually get home near midnight, well past my wife’s and children’s normal bedtimes, and they would leave all the coats and bags and boots in a pile by the door and collapse into bed.

Good times. Good memories. An important witness but one we enjoyed as a holiday. We haven’t been able to go the last few years because I have always had deadlines and for a few years had to send off a magazine a couple days after the march and couldn’t possibly get away. We moved away and came back and had been dropped off all the local pro-life mailing lists.

Friends’ Stories

Yesterday and this morning I’d been looking on Facebook at friends’ stories of their time at the march this year, with their pictures of themselves in the cold, pictures of the crowd, pictures of Washington. Everyone had snow storm stories. They were fun to read.

Then I thought: Wait, we could have done this. We could have gone this year. Never thought of it. No real excuse, we’d just gotten out of the habit.

The March for Life was one family down this year, the witness to the world of our enduring commitment to the defense of the unborn just that much smaller. Next year we go. I’ve put the note on the last page of the family calendar, where we put next year’s commitments, so we won’t forget again.

Do the same if you can. Good times. Good memories. Good work.