Memorial Day

In the little town in upstate New York where I grew up, Memorial Day was a big deal. There was a parade that went from the school to the cemetery, a distance of about a mile. From the school parking lot where we assembled we marched up Maple Avenue, and turned right at the stop light onto Main Street. People set up lawn chairs on their front lawns, or congregated at the street light to watch and cheer.

Veterans marched, or if they were older, rode in convertibles. The firemen, the ladies auxiliary, the Boy Scouts, the FFA (Future Farmers of America, and we didn't mean Archer Daniels Midland), the marching band, the dairy princess in a convertible, a new fire truck and an ancient one, and often a few floats. I remember spending hours attaching flowers to a chicken wire contraption of a float one cool summer morning.

Kids rode their bikes near the end, festooned with red, white & blue crepe paper streamers. Some years I marched with other kids from school, carrying a freshly picked lilac. When I was in high school I had to march in the band, wearing the uniforms some penny-pinching soul had purchased in the 1950s, to last forever. They were thick wool, with a heavy leather overlay with the school emblem on it. Every year someone from the band either dropped out or collapsed from heat exhaustion. The band director would carry a spray bottle to keep us cool. Of course, we only wore those heavy wool uniforms on one, or two days, of the entire year: Memorial Day and 4th of July. Days that make you think of wool.

The highlight of the parade for me was the reading of the poem "In Flanders Fields". Some years it was read at the fire hall in the center of town; some years at the cemetery. The woman who read the poem every year had a wonderful whiskey and cigarettes voice and I hear that voice whenever I think of these words:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.


Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Here's a great site with the history of this wonderful moving poem.