Occasionally, my weekly column will be about sports, but sports will not be its primary focus. Today’s column, if you want to think of it this way, holds on to sports with one hand while grasping at a social issue with the other. Oh, don’t worry, I am not going to tackle the subject of sports leagues and teams threatening to pull out of North Carolina over who can use what bathroom like you have been emailing me to try to get me to do. I am in the process of writing that one, but it’s not quite ready yet. No, today’s column is about the upcoming weekend: what it means, and what it should mean. Memorial Day has its roots in the late 1860s. It started as Decoration Day, where families of fallen Civil War soldiers placed flowers and other decorations on their loved ones’ grave markers. Communities with large numbers of Civil War dead held remembrances in connection with that practice in late spring. That tradition continued for a century, until the federal government made it an official federal holiday on the last Monday in May in 1971. For many years, local ceremonies have been held and included small parades which ended at cemeteries and concluded with military honors and 21-gun salutes. When I was a kid, the Memorial Day parade and service was the centerpiece of the day. That was the event you went to, and it was what you planned everything else around. It’s not that way anymore, and that’s really a shame. The primary purpose of Memorial Day is to honor the nation’s war dead. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? Like many things of my childhood, attending Memorial Day services has been swallowed up by everything else that is going on during the three-day weekend: cookouts, swimming, fishing, camping, family get-togethers, bike rides – and there isn’t a darn thing wrong with any of those things. As a matter of fact, you could attend the Memorial Day ceremony in your community and still do any combination of the aforementioned activities. The IHSAA has almost always trampled on Memorial Day by having high school baseball sectionals begin on the last Monday of May. Some sectional sites that don’t have lights will play several games on Monday. This year the IHSAA master school calendar falls so that Monday is a championship day and effects fewer kids and their families than in the past. I think of Memorial Day as I do Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day and similar holidays – kids ought to be in school and they should devote a large section, if-not-all of the day, to learning about the history of Memorial Day, with special guest speakers who have fought in and watched people die in combat. I know that cramps the style of our local thought process, but you’d get used to it. There is a more immediate way you can pay tribute to America’s war dead. I would like to encourage you to put your hand over your heart, and teach your kids to do it too, during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. In all transparency, I was a hands-behind-my-back-staring-at-the-flag kinda person for most of my life. I am as patriotic as they come, a trait that I gladly inherited from my dad. But putting my hand over my heart just wasn’t cool. But then 2010 happened. In October of 2010 I boarded a plane with my wife bound for China and the adoption of our first child. We spent 17 days in a foreign land. There were a lot of things I missed while we were there: cow’s milk, tap water … and the American flag. We were treated very well during both of our trips to China, but seeing Old Glory flying above our consulate when we went there to finalize the paperwork that allowed our kids to come home with us was like seeing a dear friend for the first time in a long time. When you step up on that curb and know that ground is American ground it’s a moving experience. When we landed in Detroit on our way home on that first trip, we had several hours to wait for our flight to Indianapolis. As we settled in at the gate where that final flight would take off from, I pulled up the laptop and found the Marine Band’s version of our National Anthem. With the tears streaming down my face, and my new little girl in my lap, my right hand automatically moved across my chest. It’s happened every time that song has played since, too. My sense is, if you’ve lost someone in military combat or activity, Memorial Day runs deep in your heart. If not, do yourself a favor and find those families or find a veteran who served with men and women who died in action and ask them what Memorial Day means to them. Those people are not hard to find. They’ll be in your local cemetery Monday morning, placing flowers and decorations on the grave markers of fallen soldiers.
