MEMORIES OF MEMORIAL DAYS PAST

Memorial Day Weekend.  People are busy with trips, picnics, camping, gardening...late spring leisure activities, even though where I live it is cloudy and cool -- only 56-degrees during my morning walk along the waterfront.  But this weekend always reminds me of my midwest childhood when Memorial Day was the start of summer and already hot and sunny.

Also the Indy 500 happens this weekend, which made me think of my dad and my paternal relatives in southern Indiana and the childhood drives from our northern Illinois town to Bloomfield, Indiana the nearest little town to the farmstead where my dad grew up.

We passed through Indianapolis on those trips,  -- home of the Indy 500 -- and the biggest thing to happen in Indiana ever, it seemed by all the excitement.  Once further south, in rural Bloomfield where my relatives lived,  parades and picnics and visits to cemeteries were organized around the start time of the race, with the ongoing commentary tuned in on the radio for the entire day. The excitement would build as the men in the family cheered for their favorites as the race was close to ending.   Drivers like A.J. Foyt, Andy Granatelli, Parnelli Jones, and Mario Andretti -- not exactly hometown boys, but heroes of The Brickyard nonetheless -- seemed to always be in the hunt.  As the checkered flag moment approached anyone within earshot of the radio was hushed so the winner's name would be heard and celebrated.  The RADIO!  Seems weird now and makes me feel very old -- but we were in a very rural area and TV reception was horrible, if anyone had a TV at all in the late 50's/early 60's.

My mom called Memorial Day "Decoration Day".  This is a term dating back to the Civil War; a day set aside to honor the Civil War dead.  Eventually it became more widely known as Memorial Day to honor all war dead, but wasn't officially declared a National Holiday until 1971, a fact I find surprising.

The old name, Decoration Day, made perfect sense to me as a child.  I knew it as a day for an outing

to "decorate" the graves of family members who had passed away.  Few if any that I knew of in my family had died in war. Still, fresh flowers, plastic flowers, little live plants, wreaths on wire hangers -- any and all were loaded into the trunk of the Chevy and the whole extended family caravanned to the cemetery.  If we were in Indiana, the cemetery was on the edge of little Bloomfield were my grandparents and a couple of uncles were already buried.  If we stayed home in Illinois, the cemetery was out in the country, the gravesites under shady oaks where my maternal grandparents and parents now rest.

I loved going to the cemeteries.  I found both to be so restful, peaceful, and beautiful.  Both in quiet rural settings with old-fashioned gravestones that marked each plot, giving names, birthdate, and date of death in fancy lettering.  Some, not my family, but some we noted as we wandered about also told a bit about the person who had died.  I loved these little one- or two-line insights into a life.  I filled in whole biographies with my imagination.

I don't visit cemeteries on Memorial Day anymore.  As an adult I moved 2000 miles from "home" and my visits to the midwest now are few.  But today I am thinking of those childhood pilgrimages to honor loved ones and offer some decoration to the stones that mark the lifespan of people who lived, loved, worked, played and raised families.   My ancestors were farmers; my parents the first generation to migrate to the city.  My generation (my brothers and I) never knew the hard-scrabble life of subsistence farming in the Great Depression, taking for granted what my parents provided for us with long hours doing factory work, building a blue-collar Post WWII middle-class life that led to us having so many more opportunities than they ever dreamed of.   I honor them, all of them generations past, and I thank them on this day of Decoration and Memorial.

I planted flowers in my garden today and I lit a candle for those who have passed.  I even briefly tuned into the race....just to hear the roar of those engines and the feel the memory of the warmth of an Indiana sun on my face.

May your Memorial Day be full of warm memories too.  May we all appreciate those who served in so many ways to provide a path to the life we live today.

At least, that's the view from here....