Memorial Day didn't start with mattress sales.
It grew out of grief. After the Civil War, towns all over the country started holding what they called Decoration Day — people gathering at cemeteries, placing flowers on the graves of soldiers. It was simple, and it was serious. By 1971, Congress made it an official federal holiday, the last Monday in May.
If you grew up in a small Ohio town in the 1960s or '70s, you knew what the day felt like. The high school band warmed up in the school parking lot. The American Legion color guard pressed a small red poppy into your hand before the parade.
The poppy was symbolic of the poem written in 1915 called In Flanders Fields. Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae wrote it. The red poppy became a sign of remembrance, and for decades, they were handed out in front of grocery stores and before parades – disabled veterans made them.
You didn't know all that as a kid. You just held onto the paper flower.
The parade moved slowly down Main Street. It was never very long. Many of the World War II veterans proudly walked the route. Some of them were still straight-backed and steady, men who had landed on the beaches of Normandy or went ashore at Okinawa. These were the men Studs Terkel would sit down with years later for his book, The Good War, just letting them talk.
On Memorial Day, you could watch these unassuming men of valor, who on every other day of the year were just your neighbors.
Afterward, there was the VFW hall. Someone's uncle would be working the grill – cooking chicken quarters slathered in a sauce someone's mom had been making for thirty years. The older folks sat in the shade and talked about people whose names were carved on the monument out front. It was a good afternoon. But under all of it ran something quieter — a seriousness nobody had to explain.
At home, the TV ran war movies all day. Twelve O'Clock High. Sands of Iwo Jima. You watched with your dad, and sometimes he didn't say anything for a while.
For kids, it also meant school was out, or nearly. Summer had arrived. That happiness was real, too — it just didn't erase the other thing we honored that day.
Then came Vietnam, and for years those who served were left out. They came home to a country that was angry and exhausted and didn't know how to treat them. There weren't many parades for them. Then the wall went up in Washington in 1982, and something long overdue finally shifted in how the country saw those men and the war they'd fought.
We got there. A long time coming, but we got there.
Somewhere since then, the day drifted into little more than a three-day weekend. The sales arrived. The solemnity faded.
As we celebrate our 250th birthday, it’s worth finding it again. So this year, pin on a poppy, line the street, let the band play. It’s worth it.