This commentary was in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune and it did take me back to the Memorial Days of my childhood. I have wondered at times, if I'm the only one who is disgusted by how it's "business as usual" for retail outlets on national holidays, especially on the Fourth of July, but also Memorial Day and Labor Day (the irony of this on Labor Day seems lost on many people.) My niece works at a store at the Mall of America and I was shocked by how mobbed the place appeared to be when I dropped her off there today. Of course, what is more American than making a buck?
As far as this commentary goes,I especially liked the last paragraph, which I took as a subtle slap at Bush and his policy of no pictures of the caskets coming back from Iraq.
Susan Lenfestey: Where is the shared hope of our old Memorial Days?
At post-WWII parades, even kids seemed to sense the relief that the war was over.
Susan Lenfestey
In May I hear drums, or I think I do. The rhythmic rat-a-tat of my neighbor's roof project, the deep thrum of the subwoofers on the low-rider idling ahead of me, the sharp staccato burst of the pileated woodpecker in the newly lush canopy outside my window -- all take me back to the sounds of the Memorial Day of my childhood. It's conditioning I suppose, part of being, well, a boomer -- the generation that grew up in the patriotic aftermath of World War II, when Memorial Day packed almost as much of a wallop as Christmas.
With time unwinding slowly off the spool back then, as it does for children, I didn't realize how fresh the war still was for the grown-ups around me. For children it was all sensory pleasure, the sounds and smells of summer, and a parade to kick it all off....
Even though we decorated our bikes, we only rode to the parade, not in it. That was reserved for people in uniform, and there were lots of them in 1950, including Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, white-gloved hands awkwardly clasped around flagpoles secured hard against the belly. Each year some flush-faced Scout would invariably go all wobbly in the heat, just at the crest of the hill before it spilled out onto the village green. This parade wasn't about floats, with mermaids waving from tissue-paper coral, or animated bears toting oversized balloons. It wasn't about fun, and yet it was fun to watch the rows and rows of men and women pass in front of us, jaws jutting, arms swinging in unison, the marching orders called out in sing-song cadences like jump-rope rhymes....
As names were read and shiny magnolia-leaf wreaths placed at the foot of the monument, the grown-ups dabbed at their eyes, because even in my affluent Chicago suburb there had been shared sacrifice and enormous loss. So the secure happiness we children felt must have stemmed from something else, something we sensed beneath the sorrow -- perhaps relief that the war was over and hard-earned confidence in the future.
This Memorial Day I miss the fanfare and the drums, but most of all I miss the shared relief of a difficult chapter ending and the shared hope for a brighter one ahead. And I wonder, how do we honor our dead when we are asked not to notice?
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