It's Decoration Day
And I've got a family in Mobile Bay
And they've never seen my Daddy's grave.
But that don't bother me,
It ain't marked anyway.
—Jason Isbell/Drive-By Truckers, “Decoration Day”
Charlie Pierce starts his weekend email off with those lines. This weekend is for remembering, and read on to be smacked in the face by the irony of that for Pierce. It’s also become all about the start of summer — going places, being with people, getting together with family; all the things that have become life-threatening activities this year. This is going to be a Memorial Day weekend with a twist, in that right about now we should be hitting 100,000 dead from the pandemic. The actual number is almost certainly higher. (Anyone who lived through Vietnam War years knows that politicians always have problems with body counts.)
If that wasn’t enough, while we’re all trying to cope with pandemic, the climate crisis has not taken the weekend off.
And once more Pierce wraps it up.
This is going to be a Memorial Day that people remember. Cemeteries, including St. John’s, have cut back their hours. People are taking virtual tours. Find-A-Grave will get a workout. This is a Memorial Day already hung thick with casualties that continue to mount. This is going to be a Memorial Day that people remember.
They will remember two months locked in at home. They will remember aging parents and grandparents dying alone, watched over by nurses in space suits. They will remember masks, and elbow bumps, and the general reek of hand sanitizer. This is going to be a Memorial Day that people remember.
I will look at that picture of my father again, chilling on the steps of a Mississippi Quonset hut, months from embarking for the first time for England, with a ship full of ammunition and aviation fuel. I will remember all that because I am alive and I have a memory and he is not, and didn’t have one even while he still was. This is going to be a Memorial Day that people remember.
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