Just Another Day

Last year at this time, I was miserable with shingles. Thank heaven, they didn't revisit while I was working on the garden the last few weeks -- I was afraid they would

About the only bright spot this holiday was that our son came to spend two nights so we could catch up on how he is doing -- phone calls aren't really enough sometimes.

Memorial Day -- or Decoration Day as it was sometimes called by people older than me, was a very patriotic holiday when I was a kid. Military bands, heroes in convertibles, a long but heartfelt ceremony in the cemetery near our house, and the walk home, slowed by sidetracked paths to admire the living flowers on the graves. We would have planted geraniums, ageratums and petunias on my grandfather's grave on the previous Saturday in a time-honored order only my father remembered.

If it was warm enough, there would be a family picnic in the backyard that afternoon, the first of three every summer.

Time and geography and circumstances make all those things just memories. I can't set aside the disappointments I feel about Korea, Viet Nam and now Iraq, which have taken the starch out of my childhood patriotism, and dulls the tones of patriotic speeches. Perhaps it is just the disillusionment of old age. I'd give anything to not have this emptiness in my heart.