In the U.S., Memorial Day is observed on the final Monday in May – this year, May 27. Formerly called Decoration Day, it started after the Civil War as commemoration of the nation’s war dead. The meaning and observance of holidays tend to dilute with time. When I was a boy, the school year didn’t end until about a week into June, so Memorial Day was a preview of the coming summer vacation.
In the morning
we would walk to the parade, where each kid was given a small American flag on
a stick. The parade was predictable and exciting – marching bands, Marines in
dress blues carrying flags and rifles, beauty pageant winners on a flatbed truck, city
officials waving from convertibles, and members of civic and fraternal organizations,
some wearing fezzes or campaign hats, shambling in unmilitary fashion. We
stood on the curb, waved our flags and joined the end of the parade as it
marched to the cemetery. There, the Marines fired their rifles after a brief
ceremony, we sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and went home.
I haven’t
been to such a parade in more than half a century. Today I remember the holiday’s
purpose privately, especially now that my middle son is a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps. It’s a day off, a long weekend, I can sleep in. No picnics or parades. My
observance isn’t much better than John Cheever’s as recorded in his Journals (1991), in the first entry in
the section titled “The Sixties”:
“Memorial
Day. A new notebook. A man wearing a powdered wig and a tricorner carries a
bass drum past the liquor store. I do not take my younger son to the parade, as
I would have done two years ago. I have grown this old, not to say jumpy. Taking Ben to see ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ I
think of X, who, suffering from melancholy, walked through the city looking for
moving pictures that dealt with cruel and sudden death, torture, earthquakes,
floods, and assassinations—with any human misery that would, briefly, make his
own burdens seem lighter.”
The meaning
of Memorial Day and much else is lost in the journal entry. Cheever joined the Army
in 1942 and served in the Signal Corps in Astoria, Queens. By the Sixties he
was profoundly alcoholic. Perhaps we can forgive him. R.L. Barth was a
Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War and has become its poet laureate. In “Why
We Fight” (Simonides in Vietnam: And
Other Epigrams, 1990) he writes:
“We fight
for no
Slant
domino,
Ragged-ass
flag,
Or body-bag;
Say, rather,
for
Buddies—but
more,
Even, for
grief
And lost belief.”
2 comments:
The Memorial Day parade our host recalls still takes place across town in Bedford, Ohio. I bike over there every year, and follow in the parade's wake to the old cemetery, where the remembrance ceremony is held with shots and Star Spangled Banner. Residents sit along the street in their camp chairs watching. I'm pleased that the parade has survived in this neighborhood so close to the inner city.
If I read R.L. Barth's poem without any context or author's name, I would immediately recognize that it could only be about the Vietnam War, an epic tragedy.
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