esrosedotblog

When I was a kid, Memorial Day meant a lot.

For one thing there was a half day of school the day before or nearest which commenced with a short service around our flag pole and then a walk of over a mile to a nearby cemetery where we paid our respects to the war dead. And any one else.

This day had been Decoration Day which denoted the activity of cleaning up gravesites, A hard winter would have played hell with plants and grass and the like.

This was before the Monday designation so the day fell on the 30th of May. No matter what. Hotel reservations, long weekends notwithstanding.

I was a child of the Second World War and we did have our remembrance of the local dead. One kid. His mother was always at the memorialization. His cousins were in classes around mine. Jimmy Evans. Another kid, Blitz was the name, seemed to have no family. At least not around the flag and stuff.

My Dad had been on the Navy. Too old to be drafted he volunteered. He was a radar man on a ship, a Destroyer Escort going back and forth over the North Atlantic. Finally the Pacific. He never got over it. Dreams. Craziness. Battle fatigue, I suppose.

Wars were on our minds. We had just lived through the World War and then there was the Korean War. Yeh, I know, a police action but if you died in it the distinction is not too important.

For the holiday, they always had a firing squad at the graveyard. Then we went home. Incidentally, before they were pacified they were not Japanese. None of that. It took a long time to get over the hurt. My Dad never did, ever. The "nips" -- Nipponese.

It was all very somber. War was close. Near to our hearts.

It was also the time of our fear of the red menace.

I remember that as kids we turned quickly from war games with "Japs" (Germans was too touchy, most of us were close descendants of Germans). Which morphed into Koreans. The same thing we thought.

Flags were at half staff. People slowed down. Quiet lay over the land.

Now it is burgers and shit and who even thinks about "foreign wars"?

Labels: holidays