The Heroics of Being Alive, Part 1

The Ceremony

Author’s Note: Friends, for the past several years, I’ve made a point of adding or updating an essay about my father’s military service and posting it around Memorial Day. What began as a short remembrance of my dad, who was a reluctant soldier, has grown substantially. I add to it each year, including this year. Despite its expanding, I fear we still haven’t come to any conclusions. But we’ll keep trying, if for no other reason than because my father deeply disliked being a soldier and perhaps he’d appreciate my attempts to come to terms with this part of my family history.

So, this year, we’ll present you this new updated essay in five parts – Today, Part One, is titled The Ceremony. I leave judgement to you all and post without further comment.

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Part 1: The Ceremony

For the past couple years, I found myself standing in the parking lot of my daughter’s school listening to an elementary school Memorial Day concert. There is always a small section up front reserved for a handful of veterans. At one point, while a recording of “Grand Old Flag” plays, one of the classes presents the veterans with hand-made poppies.

Each class takes turns singing some patriotic anthem. Some individual kids come up and read a poem or an essay.

And this year, there was a bucket band, with a group of mostly boys playing plastic buckets decorated with red, white and blue stars.

Two years ago, Little Bean’s first grade class drew the “America the Beautiful” straw and she sang delightfully, mimicking the motions of a tall tree, fruited plains and crowning thy good. This is the same as I did when I was her age. Last year, the song had something to do with being a hero but for the life of me I couldn’t hear much of it over some nearby construction. She did, however, wear a red, white and blue, headband.

This year, in third grade, she sat right out in front, first row, and wore a red sparkling head band. She admitted that the head band was actually for Valentine’s Day but she decorated it with butterfly hair clips so that somehow made it work for a Memorial Day concert.

Her class sang Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” though everybody knows that song as Proud to be an American. At the proud verse, the kids all stomped their feet and stood up tall.  

Incidentally that song by Greenwood was released on May 21, 1984. Thirteen days later, Bruce Springsteen released “Born in the U.S.A.” I’ll leave it to you to ponder which is a more appropriate patriotic song.

For me, as I stand there on the hot pavement, it begins to feel like these ceremonies all start to bleed together. There’s going to be a parade. And then sometime soon is Flag Day and Fourth of July, and there’s Veterans Day and Armed Forces Day. There’s also an actual holiday called Loyalty Day. Some communities still celebrate that.

I confess to just feeling tired by it all. Did you know, for example, that the original last stanza of the poem that became “America the Beautiful” is not “And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea.” Rather, early feminist Katharine Lee Bates ends her poem with the not so gentle reminder, “Till nobler men keep once again / Thy whiter jubilee.” She was referring to Chicago’s “White City” 1893 exposition but the Congregationalists didn’t want there to be any… let’s say mix up… and added the brotherhood line whole cloth.

We sing a song celebrating nature and technology and heroes on a day designed to honor the valor of dead soldiers in an elementary school parking lot with little kids reciting poems about the glory of war and all I can think about is my father peeling potatoes in occupied Japan.

I feel mixed up. I feel sad about the whole thing.

Tomorrow, Part 2: The Romance