Memorial Day
Memorial Day weekend is generally considered to be the beginning of summer here in Illinois. A rule of thumb, anything planted before Memorial Day can be lost to frost. With the arrival of this weekend, it is as if one hears a starting gun. The race begins to capture to the full the benefits of summer.
I do not come from a military family, one that customarily has members going off to war with each generation. Therefore I do not have a strong tie to ceremonies memorializing the war dead. I think that war is something to be avoided. Sometimes war is necessary and those who fight and die are not hero’s. They are caught in a terrible dehumanizing maw of fate, and do what they have to do to survive, even it that means killing someone else who has the same thing in mind. We celebrate war with pomp and circumstance to disguise its dark demonic reality.
For me memorial day is opportunity to be with family, and to think about some of the more peace-able, humanly productive rituals, such as the Indianapolis 500 race. I caught a glimpse of Indy while having lunch at Hogs and Kisses in Lake Geneva on Sunday. Indy race cars are single purpose machines, extreme applications of human ingenuity, with driver and crew-men and women risking fortune and lives to see the checkered flag first. The visual, sensual experience of the event is that of a great sculpture of collective human effort, living and moving at 200 mph+ speeds for 500 miles.
The other prominent aspect of the Memorial Day weekend has to do with
Nature, working outside to cultivate the bit of Nature placed in my custody. By dint of determination, I put 15 tomato plants, 5 cucumber, and 3 squash plants into the dark moist earth in a morning of work. I dug out the last bit of soil with my hand and felt the grit under my finger nails, noticed the ache in my back. Then a delicate small plant was placed at home in a small hole. I thought to myself, “So this is how my dad and mom felt, spring by spring.” The effort to put in the garden always connects me to my departed parents and my grandparents.
I have a small ceramic frog that keeps me company on the patio.
