“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.” ― Annie Dillard

• Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.
• Originally known as Decoration Day, it originated in the years following the Civil War and became an official federal holiday in 1971.  Did you realize it was that recent a holiday? (www.history.com)
• Each year on Memorial Day a national moment of remembrance takes place at 3:00 p.m. local time. A “Taps Across America” is planned for this year. Click on the link to learn more. I remember being in Galveston for dinner one evening and discovering there was a veteran who played “Taps” each evening from the balcony across the intersection. All the other residents, business owners and tourists gathered together in the cool breeze and stood in honor for those few minutes, all together as one.

Memorial Day is often confused with Veterans Day. That holiday, formerly known as Armistice Day, was originally set as a U.S. legal holiday to honor the end of World War I, which officially took place on November 11, 1918. In legislation that was passed in 1938, November 11 was “dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.'” As such, this new legal holiday honored World War I veterans. In 1954, after having been through both World War II and the Korean War, the 83rd U.S. Congress — at the urging of the veterans service organizations — amended the Act of 1938 by striking out the word “Armistice” and inserting the word “Veterans.” With the approval of this legislation on June 1, 1954, Nov. 11 became a day to honor American veterans of all wars. (www.military.com)

You have people in your family or circle who have served in the military. Some have given their lives in that service. Of course you always remember them. But most importantly, don’t forget to bear their memory to the next generation. Tell your friends, loved ones, children and their ancestors about who they were. Don’t limit their lives to this tremendous service, open their story and tell some of the details to others.

I’ve got a platform in the classes I teach to talk about world events. World War 2 dramatically changed the fortunes of my family. Every male in my grandfathers immediate family served in the war, and all returned home! It was a very large family. I try and explain to others the dramatic change in fortunes this experience had on our extended family for generations to come. What I don’t do is tell the individual stories enough, how those young men left the hard scrabble of the Texas Hill Country and changed the world.

I just told my daughter that her great-grandfather, who served in WW2, helped to rebuild the bridge over the Llano River back in the 1930’s. It was a public works program, one of thousands that FDR had launched to help get us out of the Great Depression. My daughter is a history teacher, I knew she’d appreciate this part of the story. Also, a little drama, he fell off while working on it!

There are heroes in your life, aren’t there?

What about making your new normal life one that is lived passing down the memory of heroic figures in your life to the next generation? It seems we are surrounded by anti-heroes these days. These make for much better television.

There’s a box on my table that I’m collecting old framed photos into. My plan is to send to a cousin so he can hold these memories as I have. He’s got a young son who needs to hear about his ancestors and who he came from.

Why don’t you decide to hang up a picture, have more family dinners with no technology, make a phone call or write something down? Make an extra effort to remember aloud people who made a difference and whose deeds and values still could? Make a kind of memorial day in your life for the sake of others who need some nourishment.

I made some cookies the other day. The kind my grandmother used to make. None of us are supposed to be eating cookies these days, so there’s no one to share with. The act reminded me of a memory of place. There are people in your life who were significant, but there were also places and times. These should be remembered too. My grandmother had a little narrow kitchen, no appliances to speak of (certainly not a dishwasher!), yet she cooked and baked plain old memories for her family. My version of those cookies don’t seem right, but they did the trick. I remember the place so long ago and how happy it made all of us because we were loved.

“As you get older, it’s more difficult to have heroes, but it’s just as necessary.”
― Ernest Hemmingway

And then, there’s all the health and wealth that remembering brings to your own self. Don’t forget these people for all of the subtle influence, the investment of time and attention, the examples of character and love. Remember the heroes from the past and what each has planted in the soil of your life.

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts…. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner