Memorial Day

 

We think of this weekend (more than the day, some of us) as the official beginning of summer, and this year, after the last seige, we more than ever feel the need to open out and celebrate.  There will be a parade in town, and the cemetery will be adorned with flags for veterans...those for whom Memorial Day officially commemorates.

 I looked for the  formal photo of my father in his Navy uniform but found more quickly my parents' wedding portrait from January, 1944.  I suppose, being born a year later, that I am the memorial now, a personal testimony to wartime life.  My father, flying the coast of South America as an engineer on patrol, found out about my birth over the radio, and saw me only months later when their patrol returned to base in Miami.  There are so many stories they told of that life there...the apartment building (it is still standing) where they shared friendships and scarce resources with other families whose men were fighting...the maternity nurse who would cry that she had joined the Navy to see the world and was assigned there instead...the Miami Beach of wide sands, tall palms and thick gardens...scorpions who found their way into the kitchen.  

There were crashes in the jungle and repairs made by trading rum for parts and help.  Then the whole story of how my father, though exempt from service because he supported his mother and siblings, joined up suddenly one day, not wanting to sit at home (he worked for the post office, my grandmother's idea of a job with a future, though not his)  away from action and service.  Older than most recruits by sometimes a decade, and having seen more of the country and more of street life, too, he told of having to help shape the homesick, naive youths in his company to be of use to a unit. Somewhere I have a photo of them, he in the front, larger and older, against a sea of faces whose expressions ranged from brazen to bemused.  My uncle, a medic in the Army, told his own stories of that time; there was no tone of bravado in his. Nor in the reluctant sketches from older cousins, taken prisoner of war.

So Memorial Day has become for us a patchwork of second- and third-hand memories, for none of us in the family has seen war except from afar, both in time and space.  We "remember" those who fought for wars that others imposed on them; we "believe" that their fighting and suffering saved us our freedom.  Freedom for some of us, anyway, for sometimes it seems that the same divisive threats, the same antagonisms, the same bravados and blindness, rule the waves from neighborhood to globe.  

I'm sure some socio-anthropologist or historical psychologist has a theory about that everlasting human failure.  But it would be useless to read it; it just makes me tired.

photo by Sadie DiLiddo

Still, in peace for the moment, today we raise our flag to hope and to the brave; we pull together, as I have been doing yesterday and today, our picnics and cheer each other over drinks on the porch.  My aunt sends me this photo of her Memorial Day at the shore, a lifetime for me of peace, safety and care.

She asks us on the phone whether we are having our hot dogs and hamburgers, which reign in their memories as the chief menu for not only this day, but Fourth of July and Labor Day...the national days of memorial.  At 98, she has much to remember and memorialize. 

She may be disappointed in my menu.  I'm afraid that as much as I love inheriting and carrying on family traditions, I can't make myself be a hot dog and hamburger kind of celebrant.  Because we haven't begun our larger social activities here yet...our neighborhood is famous for them, but we are pretty cautious still...a few neighbors are joining me on my porch this evening. 

Here's what we are having:

It celebrates summer, and in no small way honors the bounty I feel grateful to afford.  Fruits of others' labors, herbs and flowers that grow in soil from others' work, food enough for family, company, and anyone else who shares a table, or a garden, or a life.

There are so many to remember on Memorial Day...soldiers, yes, but also everyone who struggles to keep us alive and well:  farmers, farm workers, day laborers, health workers and responders of all sorts who in all sorts of ways, whether we see or realize them or not, provide freedoms for us.  

Who perhaps lost their lives in that service, too.

For me, today is their day, too.