If not exactly raised to the level of tradition, it is at least a habit in our family to skip the formal indoor Memorial Day convocation and instead catch up with the parade as it proceeds down Church Street and into Green Cemetery, where we take part in the graveside remembrances of deceased soldiers and listen to the taps and the firing of the muskets.

The indoor ceremonies start at a precise time, but the parade steps off whenever the speeches and convocation ends, so every year we have to make an approximate guess at when to be ready to fall into place as the marching band, scout troops, decorated veterans and other dignitaries march by.

This year, the kids opted to sleep late. I was a little disappointed. Memorial Day is one of those holidays that it’s all too easy to let go by without formal observances, like Veterans Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I think it’s important to make the extra effort to do something to commemorate the intent of the holiday. But I didn’t want to insist on it, so I let them sleep, and left on my own to meet my mother at the appointed place from which we planned to await the parade.

But we mis-estimated the schedule. By quite a lot, as it turned out. We sat on a bench by the Church Street baseball field for a full hour waiting to see the parade. And it turned out to be the best Memorial Day observance ever.

My mother and I see each other almost daily throughout most of the year. I stop by my parents’ house after the kids leave for school most weekdays; on weekends we get together for family dinners or we run into each other at my son’s baseball games.

But we’re always busy, even when we make that effort to spend time together. In the morning, I’m already thinking about what I need to do once I get to work; my mother is often assembling whatever she needs for her commitments that day, or making dinner preparations, or my husband is reminding me that I’m supposed to be watching the baseball game and not chatting.

We weren’t busy as we waited for the Memorial Day parade to pass by, though. We didn’t have a single thing to do. We didn’t know we’d be sitting there for an hour; neither of us had brought so much as an envelope to address, let alone a newspaper to read.

And it was wonderful. We talked. Not at great depth; just at great length. It was leisurely. We had time. We talked about odds and ends. Recipes. Books. Upcoming travel. Other family members. Current events.

I don’t think it’s the beginning of a tradition, or even a habit. I don’t think we’ll purposely get to the parade too early next year just to sit and talk. But it was memorable. When I help people write their memoirs and family stories, sometimes they tell me about Christmas rituals or annual vacations, but other times they tell me about things like this: little everyday rituals that they still remember decades after the fact. One gentleman told me about how his mother made bologna sandwiches whenever they had a long car ride. Another client told me about her piano teacher sending her around the corner to buy him a cup of coffee every week – the first adult to trust her with money and a solo shopping excursion.

The parade did finally pass by. My mother and I fell into step at the end, as the spectators are supposed to do, and we progressed to the cemetery for the graveside observances. It was a meaningful Memorial Day. Meaningful because of the traditional observances, of course. But also because of that absolutely unexpected, absolutely unhurried hour, unplanned and unwanted but completely welcome when it happened. An hour to do nothing but visit with each other. A memorable Memorial Day moment, indeed.

I’m delighted to be able to say that my memoir business has been growing fast lately. Word of mouth is my best marketing device, and each time new clients sign on, their friends and neighbors and relatives hear about it and think they, too, might know someone who would like to be written about. 

A lot of my business is still what I think of as whole-life memoirs, starting with the subject’s recollections of his or her parents or grandparents and ending in the present day. But as inquiries grow, so do requests for less traditional structures. And that’s been a good challenge for me lately, thinking about how I can accommodate other types of projects besides the soup-to-nuts life stories. Here are a few new projects under consideration that don’t follow quite so traditional a memoir structure:

• A prospective client has developed significant expertise in a particular niche of human resources that involves identifying and galvanizing mentor/protégé relationships. She asked if I could help her write a book that blends her own experiences in the workplace as both a mentor and protégé with some of her conclusions and insights about the process. Though she could go through a more commercial form of publishing, she likes the quick turnaround time I can provide her and wants a supply of books at the ready to hand out to participants at her workshops or to companies that contact her about consulting.

• Through years of volunteer work, a client has come to realize she has a special talent for hospice care. She has witnessed numerous end-of-life cycles and has worked closely with a wide range of patients and their families. She wants to talk through some of what she has learned through her diversity of hospice experience. 
  
• A young man dealt with a difficult time in his personal life by training for and competing in an Ironman competition. He has asked me to help him recount the story of that one year of training as well as the event itself.
  
• An elderly woman whose husband has developed fairly extensive memory loss regrets that he didn’t write more about his life while he still could, especially the rags-to-riches story of how he built his business. Since interviewing him would be difficult for me due to his memory loss, she has been sending me the newsletters he wrote over the course of decades for his employees and has asked me to try to reconstruct the account of his company from the newsletters and various speeches he’s given over the years.
  
• A middle-aged couple have both been blogging over the past two years since the husband received a discouraging medical diagnosis. They enlisted me to cull their blog entries and help them turn these materials, written by them, into a book.
  
• Earlier today, I was asked whether I could write the life story of someone who is no longer living – not based on research, like a biography, but based on other people’s accounts of him. I’d like to try. I can imagine it being sort of a memorial book, rather than a memoir. 
  
  

I’m excited about exploring all of these different options. Each one represents a different kind of story that I’m eager to see if I can help tell.

Recounting the story of your life as a narrative is just one way to honor who you are. Writing about specific time periods or events you’ve gone through, sharing your insights or expertise on a particular topic, or even gathering existing information and reworking it into a textual narrative are all other ways. Each person has a different story, and there may in fact be just as many different ways to tell these stories.

Over brunch, our friends apologized for the fact that it had taken us six months to find a mutually convenient date to get together. “It’s not us; it’s the kids,” they said. “Every weekend fills up months in advance. Sports, birthday parties, recitals, classes, Scouts. Well, you know how it is; I’m sure it’s the same in your household.”

I think they meant it as a compliment. Those irrepressible moppets: when they display a talent for soccer and a passion for classical violin and an altruistic insistence on helping out at the soup kitchen once a week and an irresistible urge to sign up to be puppy playtime volunteer at the animal shelter, what’re you gonna do?

But our household actually isn’t like that, and for years, I felt a little bit remiss. My children just didn’t seem to want to do the same whirlwind of activities that their peers did. They have their interests, of course. Tim is occupied with games or practices almost every afternoon during baseball season, and Holly usually does cross-country running in the fall and an art class during the winter, but for the most part, they don’t pursue a huge range of activities.

Part of me has always been secretly grateful. Kids’ activities are expensive, and I was happy that they didn’t ask to do things that would stretch our budget. A couple of activities per kid per season we can certainly manage; more than that might have felt like a reach. But another part of me wondered if I was ever-so-subtly turning them away from possibilities they might have enjoyed, just because I didn’t want all the work of driving them to and from activities or, worse, devoting all my time to helping manage those activities. (My sister told me recently that the only all-nighter she’s pulled since college was the time she volunteered to be registrar for her children’s soccer league. It took her literally all night to check each child’s written birth date against a passport or birth certificate before the first practice.)

The truth is that my kids spent their free time in ways not that different from how I did at their age, despite the wide variety of available options. They come home and do their homework. They go out for ice cream or hot chocolate with friends. They hang out at the library. Holly does art projects or writes short stories; Tim plays computer games. Sometimes if I’m not at work, we do errands together or go for a bike ride.

Only recently did I discover there’s a name for this approach: it’s called slow parenting, and the Boston Globe ran an article about it last weekend. But the families in the article weren’t quite like us. They were going to a lot of effort to schedule free time, which in itself is something of an oxymoron. They had to make a concerted effort to do what seems to come naturally to my household: hang out without much of an agenda.

It’s good to know that what we’ve done all along is now a coveted goal for some families. Whereas I thought we lingered over the dinner table after we were done eating because no one felt like washing the dishes, other people see this as hard-won quality time.

It’s always a good feeling when you find out that what you’ve been doing naturally is deemed worth doing. Maybe my newfound awareness of slow parenting will reassure me that there’s no reason for the kids to sign up for more classes and activities in the new school year. If they want to hang out, that’s fine. Because it turns out we’re not lazy after all. We’re just….slow. As in slow-parenting. And apparently that’s a fine way to be.