Memorial Day 2006

May 25, 2006

Every year, just about everybody forgets how just goldarned memorable Mammoth's Memorial Day weekends can be. It's a week of fun, celebration and hallowed tradition.

First, there is the annual re-striping of the Vons lot.

For one whole day, half the lot is closed while Black Gold Asphalt performs its traditional overlay and painting. While the trucks and rollers perform, Mammoth residents respond in the quaint old way: driving around in circles up by the theaters, pretending to look for spots. It's so much fun that the whole thing is repeated the next day.

Meanwhile, on roads such as Meridian Blvd., merry pranksters dressed as street workers fill the canyon-like chuckholes that result from winters like ours.

The citizens, in celebration of this time-honored practice, turn up the stereos on their thump-thump cars, turn their ball caps backwards and go racing down the street, sometimes as fast as way-way-over-the-limit.

But the best part of the weekend is when the tent sales go on. Like mushrooms they sprout, with the local merchants giving big discounts on the stuff that nobody wanted for the last nine months of the winter.

It's a big darned deal, and some of the merchants sing Mammoth Memorial Day carols as the guests dig through bins of gloves, hats, boots and whatever else somehow managed to go unsold.

Well, it's a fine start to every summer, is what we say.

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