Remembering What We’re Honoring

 

I believe that fiddling around with traditional holidays in order to make three day weekends was a mistake.  This has led to a diminishment of the individual holidays; confusion over what it is that is being honored, and co-opting by businesses for their own selfish gains.

Take the holiday, Memorial Day, just passed as a case in point.  Originally begun by slaves as a day to honor Union soldiers who were fighting for the preservation of the Union and abolition, it has evolved over the century plus since then.  The fallen from the United States’ subsequent wars have been honored on Memorial Day.  In many communities the day is celebrated as Decoration Day.  On Decoration Day friends and family decorate the graves of their ancestors and loved ones who have passed on.  Through all of these traditions there is one common factor—those being honored are dead. 

.  Memorial Day is becoming a Springtime Veterans’ Day as people us social media to thank the veterans in their lives, living and dead, for their service.  That cousin who served in Vietnam, but is still living ought to receive our thanks any day of the year, but his or her special day is on Nov. 11^th, one of the few holidays that hasn’t begun a yearly migration around the month. 

When holidays were celebrated on a particular day, regardless of where it fell during the week, it seemed that the day held more meaning.  During the 1950s the meaning of the holiday was taught in school.  Today law dictates that schools have assemblies for Veterans’ Day and MLK Day, but the others are more like—well, meh.  George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, arguably our two most important presidents, don’t have their own days anymore, having been mushed together into Presidents Day and “celebrated” on a Monday for your long weekend and shopping pleasure.

When I was a child, on the rare occasion that it fell on a Friday or Monday families often took the opportunity to take a trip over the long weekend, but most years the day fell during the week or on a weekend day without extending the weekend.  In the case of Memorial Day ceremonies were held at cemeteries and flags placed on the graves of those who died fighting for the country’s freedom.  Over time flowers and flags were left for all veterans and for extended family members.  One thing that was never intended by those slaves during the Civil War was for Memorial Day to be about sales at car or mattress dealerships.

This moving things around has not only diminished the importance of the day, it has confused many folks about exactly what is to be honoredI am sure that if we returned to the traditional dates for National Holidays retailers and the tourist industry would put up a fuss.  I email retailers who send me sales notices for either Veterans’ or Memorial Day and have even gotten a positive response from Amazon.  What if we planned our three day weekends around some destination that tied into the holiday and made a conscious effort not to buy, buy, buy as a way of honoring our national heroes?  How awesome would that be.

 

More Than a Sale Day

Monday is Memorial Day.  Its origins seem to be in the ladies of the South following the Civil War when they organized a day to remember those who’d fought for their community.  To help heal the country it was decided that the entire nation would remember those who fought and died for our country regardless of the side they fought for and gradually the tradition of decorating graves came to include all loved ones.  As a matter of fact, it came to be called Decoration Day in many communities including the one in the Missouri Ozarks where my father, Conrad R. Frieze, grew up.  This is a picture of the cemetery where some of my father's ashes are buried with his parents and grandparents.  I intend to have the rest put in Tahoma National Cemetery because there is no one left in Greenfield to even stay with if I want to visit the cemetery that is half way across the country from me.

I believe that those we love can come to us in dreams and are never far from us and I have reason to believe that applies to pets as well.  Yesterday a young friend of mine posted a blog about having had a dream about a beloved dog that passed a year or so ago.  In her dream the dog was everywhere she looked, swishing between her legs, running down the road she walked and only she could see her.  Her dream doesn’t surprise me a bit.

Last summer a most beloved cousin passed away.  On her birthday she came to her best friend in a dream.  Debra, who had been very sick and emaciated at the time of her passing looked well and healthy.  Her friend asked her how she liked heaven and she said, great!  I am so glad that Debra visited her friend and comforted that for sure she is out of pain and finally, finally feels well.

My own beloved grandmother came to me in a dream.  We were in an unfamiliar but homey kitchen.  We sat at the table there and had a lovely conversation.  I was so glad to see her!  Eventually I realized that I had to leave and that she could not.  I woke crying, but grateful that I’d had this encounter with someone so beloved to me.  Recently I discovered that a friend had the same sort of dream, including the kitchen, about her grandmother. I must say that I was glad to find someone else who’d had the same sort of visitation—or did we visit there?  No mind, it comforts me that Grandma is still thinking of me.

Memorial Day weekend is a great time to get together with family and friends, to eat summer food and have a good time, but somehow the true meaning of the day has been lost in vacationing, and Memorial Day sales.  Those in particular really make me mad.  Monday is not just a day off from work.  Take time to remember those who you loved and loved you.  They are not far off.

Another Memorial Day is approaching. A lot of folks have forgotten the reason that they are getting Monday off from work and school. It’s origins like in the post Civil War South when some Southern ladies wanted to remember their menfolk who had died in that great American tragedy. In an effort to reunite the states the holiday became recognized nation-wide, honoring all the soldiers who had died in that war. Over time many communities extended the commemorating to include all Americans who have passed away. In some places it is known as Decoration Day. My cousin has told me that Memorial Day in the Ozarks, where our family is from, is a big event. People there take it seriously.

Until his death my Uncle Dick put flowers on all the family graves in Dade County, MO. Our family has been in that neck of the woods since before the Civil War so there are plenty of deceased to honor. He took flowers to about 70 graves including several in a long forgotten cemetery in the woods. He crawled through barbed wire fences and walked through fields to get to some of the cemeteries. Some of those graves will probably never see flowers again since Uncle Dick couldn’t get the town interested in tending the one in the woods.

I’ve got a cousin in Vancouver, WA who tends the graves of our family there. Each year he washes the graves and places flowers on each one. He’s no Spring chicken now and sick this year so just getting the flowers there will be a struggle. Maybe one of his boys will step up, but youngsters today don’t seem to care unless they’ve got a friend in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Since I can’t take flowers to my father’s grave in MO we have a trip to the Tahoma National Cemetery tomorrow. I’m taking flowers to my best friend’s father and brother. Harley Beard was the pilot of the Liberator over Germany during WWII. After the war, when he’d gone to work for the Boeing Company as a test pilot, he became friends with some of those German pilots he fought against. His sons both served as pilots in Vietnam, one in the Air Force and Neal in the Army flying helicopters. Neal died a year ago and a Huey did a fly-over while the pastor said prayers and the VFW lauded him.

The Civil War is long since gone from our collective consciousness, at least in the North, and even Vietnam is just so much history to the young ones. I hope that at the very least Americans will think of the sort of love and sense of duty that causes young men and women to go into harm’s way. Many, too many, don’t come home and whether or not we agree with the conflicts they die for we ought to be moved by their willingness to serve.

The Meaning of Memorial Day

Memorial Day is special to me because I was raised before it got turned into a retailer’s holiday. We got it off, whatever the day of the week, and it was about honoring those who served our nation and gave their lives for our country. It wasn’t about buying mattresses. Moving it to make a long weekend was a mistake.

I was happy this week when my son, a teacher at Clover Park High School in Lakewood, called us from school and told us to be sure to watch King5 news that night. The station was at the school covering the second year of the students making a memorial on the front lawn to those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. A white stick with the name of each fallen soldier was carefully placed to replicate Arlington Cemetery. Members of the public have stopped by and left remembrances. At least I know that those students have some understanding of Memorial Day and a visual representation of what our current wars have cost.

Thank you students of Clover Park High School, for acknowledging the true meaning of Memorial Day.

Memorial Day

Recently I received an email from the UW’s NPR station KUOW asking what or whom I think about for Memorial Day. It bothers me that for most Americans Memorial Weekend is a long weekend to get away. For retailers it is an excuse to entice people into stores for sales. For me Memorial Day is one of the special times of the year that I pay tribute to my father, Conrad R. Frieze, and the Greatest Generation that included his brothers and brother-in-law. All of them were in the Navy during WWII. My father and his older brother Richard were on the Island of Oahu at Kaneohe Naval Air Station on December 7th 1944.

In an autobiography he left for us, my father describes the confusion of waking to the Japanese attack which struck Kaneohe before moving on to Pearl Harbor, his panic for the safety of his older brother who had worked the night shift at the hangers that housed the PBYs stationed there, the joy of finding him alive, and the fury with which they fought back with a machine gun they mounted in the waist hatch of a PBY.

When I was a child I assumed that all daddies were brave. They saved the world and then came home to raise families, become aeronautical engineers (I was raised in Bellevue and most daddies were) and build a great nation.

It was not until I had boys of my own the age that my father and his brother had been that day, as the first shots of American involvement in WWII were fired, that I realized that they had been babies. Now I look at a photo I have of the two of them standing in a bomb crater with their machine gun, shielding their eyes from the sun and scanning the sky for more zeros, and I wonder at their youth.

It would be a few hours before news of the attack would reach their mother who was visiting her own mother in the Missouri Ozarks and longer still before their telegram telling of their survival would reach their parents back in Vancouver, WA. My grandmother told me how that night she lay in bed with a cousin and listened to reports on the radio and wondered if her boys were still alive.

My father went on to fight in the battle of Midway as a PBY gunner and afterward received a cap device from a captured Japanese officer who was glad that my father had not shot him and his companions in a lifeboat which my father’s plane circled until an American ship could take them aboard. Many years later my father tracked down that Japanese officer who was by then a retired admiral. My father offered to return the cap device, but the admiral told him to keep it as his war trophy. They became friends and exchanged visits to Tokyo and Seattle.

In 1945 my father married my mother in Vancouver, WA. He was stationed on the Island of Guam for a time and then left the Navy to attend college. He graduated from Oregon State with a degree in aeronautical engineering and went to work for the Boeing Company. He worked on the B-52 program and participated in operations Redwing and Hardtack in 1956 and 1958, testing atomic bombs in the South Pacific. He worked on the 707 program and was the “voice of the 727” when Boeing sent it on a world tour that last six months. My best friend’s father, Harley Beard, was at the controls of the plane for that trip. My father also worked on the 737, 747 and 757 programs before retiring to Sandy Point near Bellingham.

Along with his birthday, Father’s Day, Veteran’s Day, and December 7th, Memorial Day is a day for me to reflect on the nineteen year old boy who frantically searched for his brother and then teamed up with him to defend our nation. I am sorry my father and his brothers are gone, but I am honored to be related to them.

Memorial Day is more to me than a day off from work or school. If it means more to you, too, check out my post on the In Your Neighborhood blog spot of the Tacoma News Tribune about another veteran, the brother of my best friend.