It goes without saying that writing essays consisting of exactly 600 words each week for a family newspaper is no easy task. There have been occasions when churning out such an article has been the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest in nothing but jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt. Given the curveballs life throws from time to time, conjuring fifty dozen relevant words that make some sort of sense can be next to impossible. But how then does one accomplish this Herculean feat? The answer: split the job up into six essays of 100 words each. Like, for example, this one.
If it seems like Memorial Day is coming early this year, well, that’s because it is. The holiday is celebrated annually on the last Monday of May. This year’s final May Monday falls on the 25th, and that’s the earliest Memorial Day can be, since any May that has a Monday the 24th also has a Monday the 31st. Memorial Day was first celebrated on May 30th, 1868. It was originally called “Decoration Day,” and was intended to honor union soldiers who had died during the Civil War. Sudden thought: is there really any such thing as a “civil” war?
Remembering the exact date of Memorial Day wasn’t all that complicated for the holiday’s first 100 years, because it came on May 30th every year. However, all that changed in 1968, when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. It moved the celebration of George Washington’s birthday to the third Monday in February, and Memorial Day to the last Monday in May. It also made Columbus Day a federal holiday, and changed Veterans Day from November 11th to the fourth Monday in October. Veterans Day got moved back to November 11th in 1978 for reasons that are unclear to me.
The Memorial Day parade was huge where I grew up. The procession marched from the firehouse to the town hall, and everyone in town lined the parade route to salute the marchers. Boys wanting to participate had to either play Little League Baseball or be a Boy Scout. In retrospect, maybe I chose wrong. The skills the scouts learned were, it turns out, a lot more useful than the ones we learned from baseball. Scouts could start fires without matches and survive in the woods. I could throw a ball faster than they could, but really, how useful is that?
When I was a nine-year-old member of the Easton Little League Hawks, I wore uniform number 2. The low numbers were on the small jerseys; the bigger the kid, the higher his number. Our giant kid wore number 15. I loved being number 2, until one day a teammate told me that in his house “Number 2” was a nasty thing they did in the bathroom that wasn’t “Number 1.” All of a sudden being number 2 wasn’t such a great thing. Fortunately I continued growing, and by the time I hit 6th grade I had progressed to number 12.
What was initially intended to be an occasion to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers later became a national holiday designated to remember and honor the fallen veterans in all of America’s wars. It’s a solemn occasion, particularly for those who lost friends or family members in either of the two world wars, not to mention subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places. My small contribution to the holiday is to write six one-hundred-word essays to remind people of the holiday’s true significance.
I’d like to see one of those Boy Scouts try that.
Andy Young
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