esrosedotblog

FOUR SCORE

OK. What to say about Memorial Day?

I don't celebrate it, actually. This is not particular to the day. I only really celebrate vaguely on Independence Day and my birthday.

Oh. Isn't my birthday a holiday? Well, it is for me. And it is a good holiday. The mail is delivered regardless. Unless, of course, it is falls on a Sunday.

In those years, I do an 'as-observed' thing on the next day, Monday. That way, I can say that one of my key holidays always has mail delivery.

But, I digress.

What about Memorial Day?

When I was a kid (OK, I see ten people leaving the room, come on back, it won't be that long a deal). Start over. When I was a kid, we had a parade to a local graveyard and did stuff over the graves of veterans.

This was a little difficult and repetitive because in all of WWII, our town only had two soldiers killed in action. They were in different grave yards so we would alternate year to year.

There was my second-cousin Jimmy who died while in the service but not in action. He was shot, though. But, it was self inflicted. He leaned over the wrong end of his shotgun on a rabbit hunt and it slid and hit a crag in the rock and went off.

Jimmy was a great guy. The kids all loved him. A born hell-raiser and troublemaker. He went into the Navy to 'get straightened out'.

I remember that somehow during his service to our country he had gone AWOL and joined a carnival. He learned how to be a fire eater. I remember the Christmas he demonstrated for all the family to see. There was the usual mix of familial response; tsk-tsking and moral outrage from the church contingent and wild admiration and envy from the red-neck wannabe bad boys in the crowd.

Home on leave after the brig and all. Maybe he had been discharged. Dishonorably. But then he wouldn't have been killed in uniform. I guess it is a fuzzy memory.

Where was I?

Memorial Day.

We would march; a parade to the cemetery. Led by the guys in the American Legion and the VFW. Mostly Legion. My Dad was a Legionaire and I think a Commander of the local Post for awhile.

Then the school band.

Not much else.

Maybe baton twirlers.

It fits the occasion.

Then to the cemetery.

There, ceremonies. The firing of arms. Taps. And, every year a recitation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

One year, I was the designated reciter. Eighth grade I think. I am not sure.

I tried it out this morning on the bike. I can still get most of it out.

It is a stirring bit of oratory.

It plainly describes the ambiguity that civilized people feel about the necessity of war.

There are no easy answers in it.

It focuses on the lost and gone soldiers who fought.

And I guess that is where the day ought to be focused. On the great losses perpetrated by causes which are or are not just.

In a day when we are not permitted to see the dead and dying and wounded it is important not only to remember, but to see. To demand that they be visible so that we can count the awful cost.

A brutal accounting for those who may frivolously throw those lives away in some inept or misguided impulse for war. Most who never saw battle themselves.

It is a serious and tragic business memorializing the dead. It requires meditation to find the answers to the eternal puzzle of why men fight and die.

I don't have those answers worked out yet. I am still working on it.