Memorial Day, 2016

Memorial Day is one of those nice little three-day-weekend holidays that we don’t seem to get enough of. Funny, even though I don’t work anywhere near full time, and help myself to plenty of three-day-weekends (not to mention three-day-workweeks), I still enjoy the long holiday weekend, starting with the Thursday night traffic jam leaving Boston, now that a lot of three-day-weekends have turned themselves into four-day-weekends.

As always, there are a lot of tourists in town. As always, a lot of the locals are out of town, and if I still had a car, there would be plenty of places to park on the streets, which seldom happens in real life. As always – or at least for the last few years – there are flags on Boston Common, one for everyone from The Commonwealth who has been killed while fighting for our country. As always – or at least for the last few years – I will head over late this afternoon and help the volunteers remove the flags. We furl them into bunches of twenty, put a rubber band around the bunch, and put them in big Rubbermaid containers – stored and ready for next year.

Tough to think of all those lives – mostly young men – lost to war. And I guess it doesn’t much matter whether it was a good war or a not so good war. (“My war’s better than your war!”) And it doesn’t much matter, either, whether you were a gung-ho patriot or a reluctant recruit, grousing all the way. At the end of the day, you didn’t get to live the full life you would have had if not for that good or not so good war. Sigh…

On holidays, I always look back on what Pink Slip had to say the year before.

Last year, I posted about Ireland’s vote to legalize gay marriage. (Up The Republic!) My first Memorial Day post was in 2007, Decoration Day. That one pretty well sums up my feelings on the day. Some things don’t change much.

On Wednesday, I’m heading out to Worcester to go, with my cousin Barbara, decorate the family graves – geraniums, a couple of spikes, a begonia for my sister Margaret’s little grave in the shade.

Whatever you’re decorating, or not, Happy Memorial Day – especially to those who were in the service, and for those who have a flag on Boston Common, commemorating someone they lost.