Memorious Day, er, Memorial Day, er Labor Day

Ok it’s the First Day of Summer so it should be Memorial Day. It’s a day set aside to barbecue in the back yard and watch baseball. Oh, and there is that car race too. It used to be called Decoration Day and people would go to cemetaries and put flowers on the graves of their dead relatives but that got really dumb and people stopped. Then for a time there were parades. After WW2 there was alwasy a Memorial Day parade because, well, it gave the local veterans a chance to march in their old uniforms and stop for a drink along the parade route.

When I was young our house faced the street they marched along and every Memorial Day we would sit on the porch and watch the procession. Of course as the years went by the veterans were not processing as well as they had been and the stops at the bars along the route were showing. The last parade we saw was in 1971 and it was pretty pathetic. After that they played with the holiday and no more parades which was just as well.

The Vietnam War was going and well, to be honest, folks did not think very much of the WW2 vets. It seemed that they enjoyed their war so much they just could not wait for their own sons to be shot it. There was something about the OFFICIAL veterans that was just, well, smarmy. The real combat veterans never marched in the parades. They just wanted to forget the war and get on with their lives and keep their own sons out it. The marchers pretty much never saw combat. They just pushed papers, did vehicle maintence, and generally as Patton put it, shoveled shit in Louisiana. And then got drunk and bragged about how they had beaten the Japanese. They never set foot on an island.

They were a pretty comtempable bunch. The Dumbest Generation.

So we sat watching them march by and every year my father, who did not serve because he had a protected occupation making parts for the machine guns, would whisper in my ear, “Remember son, those were the damned fools that got shot at.”

Mother’s Day

The first Mother’s Day after mother died was a nice, warm day, unusual for early May and I went to the White Lotus Day celebration at the Theosophical Society. Then I came home, lay down on the couch and slept through a thunderstorm and a small tornado that went through the forest preserves on the other side of town.

It was a good day, to not have to deal with my mother.

There was nothing more that needed to be said.

Ding dong! The bitch was dead!