dr_phil_physics: (tomb-of-the-unknown)
Memorial Day (Observed)

Memorial Day weekend. Big noisy movies in the cineplexes. War movies on cable, including Kelly’s Heroes and Rambo III. The 99th running of the Indianapolis 500. PBS shows the National Memorial Concert with Joe Montagne and Gary Sinise. Picnics. Beach. A day off. One whole Facebook post which showed a red poppy on a hat. 10pm Sunday night and someone has just set off some fireworks… in the rain.

This morning the Sunday Grand Rapids Press had an article about two little girls who started something in April of 1862. And there is where my story comes from.

“Memorial Day-IV”
by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

Friday 31 May 2943
West End Cemetery
Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, Nordamericano, Earth (Sol III)
     Wsh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sha.  The eight o’clock superslide from Chicago 
to Detroit passed by on the elevated techcrete track.  It was already slowing 
from 450 kph for Kalamazoo.  
     The old man was eighty-five.  He didn’t move so fast these days, but 
that wasn’t stopping him.  This section of the cemetery had opened in 2880, 
the year the war with the aliens began.  He took his time, pulling the weeds 
from around the black grantex markers.  One, two, three.  He used to count 
them.  Now he just looked to see how many rows were left.
     Wsh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sha.  The nine o’clock superslide from Detroit 
to Chicago passed by accelerating to 450 kph having just left the downtown 
Kalamazoo station.  
     Number 47 was always the hardest.  PAUL J. KUYPER (2858-2883).  They’d 
gone to school together, enlisted in the Fleet Marines together and even both 
shipped out on the cruiser USFS Kalamazoo (CCH-733).  Paul was the only man 
in this cemetery he personally knew.
     Wsh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sha.  The ten o’clock superslide from Chicago was 
arriving in Kalamazoo.  
     The old man had finished the weeding and was walking back to the start.  
He gathered his pack with the flags in it, preparing to cross an American and 
a Michigan flag to the left of each marker, and a Unified flag on the right.  
But on the grantex base of the first marker were a couple of early spring 
wildflowers with their stems twisted together.  And the next.  And the next.  
Five markers in all.  They hadn’t been there before.
     He looked around, but didn’t see anyone at first.  Then he spotted the 
two girls coming from the open fields to the west, bearing whole armloads of 
flowers.
     Donna, 8, and Theresa, 11, often came to the cemetery park.  They’d ride 
bikes up and down the paved paths or wander through the fields looking for 
bugs or frogs or turtles by the pond.  They’d gathered up bouquets of 
wildflowers this morning to take back to their mom.  But when they spotted 
the old man cleaning the base of the stones, they’d shrugged their shoulders 
and started putting their flowers down.  They quickly ran out and ran back 
for more.
     They stood and watched the old man start to plant the flags.  He didn’t 
touch their flowers.  So they went and did eight more markers.  And when 
they started heading back to the field, the old man wordlessly handed them 
a cloth bag with a handle so they could carry a lot more flowers at a time.
     Wsh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sha.  The eleven o’clock superslide to Chicago 
sped up out of Kalamazoo.  
     Wsh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sha.  The noon superslide arrived in Kalamazoo.  
     The girls’ mother followed the tracking on her own bike, to get them 
to come back for lunch.  She found them quietly placing flowers while the 
old man placed flags.  No one else was about.
     The mother joined the girls in gathering more wildflowers.  The old man 
rested from his labors, waiting for them to come back so he wouldn’t get ahead.
     Wsh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sha.  They paid no attention to the one o’clock 
superslide streaking by the cemetery.
     But they kept on laying flowers and planting flags at the bases of the 
newly weeded markers.

"Memorial Day-II" for Memorial Day 2010 (DW) (LJ).

Dr. Phil
Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Memorial Day Musings

Wednesday, 30 May 2012 13:09
dr_phil_physics: (tomb-of-the-unknown)
What Sort of Holiday?

Memorial Day Weekend. The official start of summer. Memorial Day (Observed). Three-Day Weekend. No mail service on Monday. Garbage pickup delayed by one day all week.

What are we to make of Memorial Day? Well, I guess we do a better job of commemorating the official job of it than we do Veterans Day.

Of course not everyone makes it to parades. Or to cemeteries. Not everyone has served in the military, though my dad did and most of my uncles, a couple of cousins. Many, many friends. In the U.S. we give such short shrift to many working people in terms of vacation days and holidays, that making a big commercial deal of Memorial Day is inevitable.

It's the Indianapolis 500 -- won this year under caution as one driver tried a bold move on the start of the last lap and ended up crashing. It's baseball -- with the Cubs swept by the Pirates to complete a 12-game losing skid, mollified only by a dramatic 11-7 win on Monday against the Evil Padres. (If you don't know why they're evil, then you don't know Cubs history.) (grin)

It's the National Memorial Day Concert on the Mall in Washington DC, hosted by Joe Mantegna and Gary Senise, with dramatic readings of letters of those left behind by war, carried live by PBS... well up until the point that they had to switch to a tape of last year's concert, due to severe weather rolling in and having to clear the space.

Even were I to wish to go to any of the public celebrations, parking and my left leg and crowds would have made it difficult. We mostly stayed home.

War Movies

AMC in particular spent quite a lot of the weekend showing war movies -- it's how a lot of people who don't read, serve or talk to those who do, know anything about war. The weekend started, as I recalled, with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which we hadn't seen before. Wikipedia says it's "Tarantino's highest-grossing film to date." More than Kill Bill? Amazing. And quite an entertaining train wreck of a movie. Think of it as The Dirty Dozen but more improbable. (grin) Then there's Midway, which aside from some silly personal plotlines, I've always liked Midway more than Pearl Harbor's Tora! Tora! Tora! *** -- you can't beat not knowing how many carriers there are, or "sinking" the Yorktown twice, to turn an assured defeat into a great victory. And thank goodness no one seemed to be showing that stinker Pearl Harbor. Patton, always a personal favorite of mine and George C. Scott's greatest, gravelly role. Heartbreak Ridge, is also improbable and implausible, but there's very little else that covers the invasion of Grenada to free the American medical school students. Call it a guilty pleasure, especially to watch Clint & Co. chew up the scenery. The Great Escape, a romanticized version of an actual breakout during WW II. From the age of Big Epic Movies. I'm surprised it isn't paired up with Stalag 17 for a killer POW double-feature every time.

Then they ran Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers followed by Letters From Iwo Jima, his bookend movies about Iwo Jima -- one about the American invasion and the using of the publicity machine regarding the raising of the flag(s) over Iwo Jima to sell War Bonds, and the other about the Japanese essentially abandoned in place and dug in to delay the Americans and die for the Emperor. I saw most of both, Mrs. Dr. Phil packed it in because the second was running into the early morning hours. We hadn't seen either in the theatres, particularly since (mostly) B&W films don't get booked much and I swear Letters From Iwo Jima was only shown for a couple of days shy of a week on one screen in one theatre-plex in Grand Rapids.

History Channel's six part/three-night miniseries Hatfields & McCoys also began airing on Monday, and given that the roots for the feud began during the American Civil War, which also prompted the historical roots for Memorial Day itself, I suppose it could also be grandfathered into the Memorial Day war movie filmfest.

So there you have it -- a day (or weekend) of Memorial and remembrance of those who have fallen, distilled down to a few public events and hours of movies. Thanks to all who have served, who are serving and who will someday sign up to serve.

From others in the UCF:
David on family who served.
Vince in a poignant Ken Burns moment.
Random Michelle starts with a WW I sad comment.
And then there's Jim Wright from last year, as only Jim can put it.

Dr. Phil

*** Ack! I knew it was Tora not Toro. Thanks! Corrected 5-31-2012.

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