esrosedotblog

MEMORIAL

When I was a kid, Memorial Day was meant to acknowledge and honor the war dead of our country.

It was not about live veterans. That is another day.

It was the actual dead.

We marched to the graveyards on Memorial Day and usually honored a recently dead soldier or sailor.

As I recall, there was at least one in each of four or five cemeteries in our area. Of course, there were many old dead. The Civil War in many cases being the oldest, through the Spanish American, World War I and, of course, the WWII guys who were getting the honors.

It wasn't about cookouts or auto races or any of that. It was a time of quiet and remembrance.

And it wasn't about peace either. Or politics. Or even about the right and wrong of it.

These were people, mostly men, who died in the virtually perpetual state of war that we have had here since the beginning. Loss. Suffering. Sacrifice.

At every ceremony, each year, a kid would recite Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. One year, my sixth grade year, I think, I was that kid.

I can still remember most of it. Don't test me though.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

When thinking about what they died for, I also like to think of the MLKing line about the arc of history pointing toward justice.

War is a squalid, mean exercise but if it means anything at all, we hope for justice. I am less interested in "freedom" now because that word has been co-opted for the cause de jour.

Justice and more of it.

Memorial Day was also a day to go and clean up and decorate the family graves.

We would go and get rid of the dead flowers, mow or sickle the grass, sit and think about who is in the soil and so on.

The local VFW or American Legion would have put a little flag on the grave of each veteran. Nothing wrong with that.

I remember that you had to go and get buckets of water and carry the dead grasses and plants to the junk pile.

It was a serious deal.

I am proud to say that my kids still go and visit the family graves. A few of the go together. Make it a trip. An occasion.

This is more than I ever did in my adult years. They have taken a beloved tradition and made it real again. They have to travel to do this. Cross three states to do so.

By now they have a lot of visiting to do. Some of the graves go back beyond grand and great grand parents. Or great great, if you can find them still.

Memorial Day.

Labels: nostalgia, patriotism, war and peace