Things I Remember from When I Was a Kid

All of us have those memories of when we were pre-teens and perhaps even into our teen years of things that we did every Fourth of July. One thing in particular that I remember that we would do on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July was to go to the cemetery in Ohio where my mother's family was buried. I was raised in Southeast Michigan near Detroit and my mother was raised in Dundee, Michigan which is right near the Ohio border. She was actually born in Caledonia, Ohio which, oddly enough, she never took us there. Back in those days it was not an uncommon thing for a woman to die in childbirth. And my mother's mother did just that. My mom was then raised by her aunt who lived to be 103 years old. When my mom's mom died the kids were split up with the boy is going to live with one family in California and the girls with auntie in Dundee.

One of the things I remember so vividly during those cemetery years is the fireflies. We would be driving back home after a day at the cemetery of planting flowers and trimming the grass and it would be early evening. In those days there weren't air-conditioned cars so the car windows were always open and my brothers and I would stick their hands out the windows and catch fireflies as dad was driving us back home. I remember walking around the cemetery looking for the oldest gravestones and marveling at the fact that there were headstones that were dated in the 1800s. I remember my mother always said to walk behind the gravestones and we should not walk right in front of the headstones as that was dishonoring to do that. It was interesting to see where many families had bought a plot inside the cemetery and there might be one big memorial with the family name on it and then many little plots around it. There were also plenty of just what I would call "regular headstones". I remember asking my parents why we had to do this every year and I'm not sure that I was wise enough to understand the answer: To remember our family that is gone and to bring honor to those who came before us. You see my mom's family had members who fought in the Civil War, Spanish-American war and in the Revolutionary War. One of my mother's most cherished possessions was a teacup that George Washington had once used.

I remember somebody once asking "Why do we have all the tombstones at the Arlington National Cemetery? Why couldn't these people all be buried back with their families?" this person asked. Today I can answer that question... because we need a place to memorialize those that have come before us; those that died to help give us the liberty and freedom that we have in this country. Nobody knows all of the names on those tombstones. However, everybody that's an American knows that each tombstone represents a life that was given by somebody in the military so that we could live in a free country. I remember Colin Powell's quote when visiting France and seeing all the American soldiers that were buried on French soil after D-Day. He said, we did not come to conquer France and acquire her land, we only need enough to bury the men that we sacrificed to die on your behalf. In my father is 82 years, I saw my father cry one thing. It was when the wall of Berlin came down. You see, my father moved here from the old country and he knew what that wall of repression meant. He was so glad that he shed tears of joy because he knew what it meant to family members that had not been able to see each other for years and now they would be able to see each other again.

I realize I've really wandered in my blog today and perhaps only I can see the connection between my Fourth of July and Memorial Day memories and the time that I saw my father's tears of joy, and the story about Arlington National Cemetery, but they truly are connected and I feel so lucky to live in this country.