Memorial Day weekend has likable qualities but the weather usually isn't one of them. Of course, any long weekend has a claim to public affection, as an atoll of leisure in an ocean of work. Memorial Day is one in a series of rest-stops in the calendar that includes Labor Day, Columbus Day, and President’s Day--secular holidays whose solemn, original meanings have been obscured by the universal need for respite and relaxation that they partially fulfill.
What makes Memorial Day special and endearing is that it is such a screw-up. With its sibling holidays you know what to expect. M.L. King Day is solemn and cold. President’s Day usually brings the first foretaste of spring, longer daylight, and winter clearance sales. Labor Day is the last summer holiday, when the shadows of shorter days fall earlier and more profoundly, a harbinger of cooler seasons ahead, regardless how humid the air or how high the heat. But you never know what to expect of Memorial Day because it has been forced to overachieve in play a role for which it may not be qualified.
Memorial Day is the prodigal child of holiday weekends. It makes no grandiose claims for itself, but carries our impossibly high expectations. Memorial Day is like most children--hopeful, impatient, and eager to please those implacable adults who pressure it to be what they want it to be. We ask Memorial Day to be the first summer holiday when it is more apt to be the last holiday of spring, falling as it does squarely in the milder season. We ask Memorial Day for beach weather while the ocean is still chilling after a long winter. We ask it for barbecue skies when over the past century, it has rained on Memorial Day one day out of three.
Perhaps the most confusing quality of Memorial Day is that its name denotes solemnity, mourning, and a mood more conducive to houses of worship, yet it has become a major symbol of summer frivolity and spending, inducing somber reflection only by seaside merchants lamenting poor business when Memorial Day is a rainout. In essence Memorial Day is when we drink and grill hotdogs to honor the dead.
I remember Memorial Day before it was the last Monday of May, packaged for a convenient holiday weekend. In those days it was specific to a date, May 30, and was celebrated inconveniently in mid-week, like the 4th of July, if that was when it fell, . Because it was one isolated day, it was a good sleeping day, not much for cook-outs and get-togethers. Falling at the end of May it was usually steamy and warm, a 75 degree soup, and overcast. The languor I associate with Memorial Day, a bilious boredom, is doubtless due to these first impressions of childhood. It was a day off when the weather was depressing and nobody was around to play with--a wasted day.
Since that time there have been some good Memorial Days. I once attended a fine barbecue in the surprising concrete backyard of a tenement building in the west 30s. That was a Memorial Day weekend that lived up to its summery expectations. It was also a funny occasion because it was the last time I saw men cling so tenaciously to their role as barbecue cooks. The anointed few stood over the open charcoal grill in white aprons and snowy toques and did not cede or share for a moment the priestly task of turning the drumsticks every few minutes. It occurred to me that cooking, boiling and all preparations involved with water might fall to women, but men were still consider ourselves the masters of flame, the stokers of the fire.
In some way, Memorial Day is Rorschach for how one feels about summer, especially the summer ahead, for which it is the ceremonial portal. When I was in college, Memorial Day marked the start of a long, hot summer of menial work to earn college tuition. Thus Memorial Day was unavoidably tainted by the summer that ensued. It was like Sunday evening before a dreaded workweek that in my case would last twelve weeks.
As an adult, I recall another Memorial Day that produced acute anxiety. I was in a rock and roll band that was breaking up after a busy but fruitless May. On Memorial Day I woke up at
Memorial Days have had their share of drama. I lost two wallets on Memorial weekend--both were found. On the first occasion, I found it between my car seat and the door. On the other, I roamed the entire neighborhood looking in trashcans the night I discovered it lost. The next morning, the finders called me. When they gave me the wallet they lamented that there was no money in it. I lamented with them. Of course, I was teaching at the time.
With a school age child, Memorial Day becomes just another long holiday in which the final projects and reports must be done. One of my best Memorial Day memories as a parent was when my daughter was wrapping up her kindergarten year. I had just started a new career and my daughter was doing her final science project--a wetlands diorama. We went to the park and foraged in the grass and under the trees for twigs, handsomely shaped stones and curious artifacts to put in the environment populated by plastic alligators, snakes and frogs. It was a warm, sultry day like the ones I remembered as a child, but it felt so much better now. I was able to exorcise some of those bad old feelings. Being with my family, I realized that Memorial Day was never at fault for how I felt back then. It was always loneliness.
Since I am more settled in my wage-earning ways, Memorial Day has become more of a spectator sporting event. I listen to people’s plans for this holiday, and watch them pull their suitcases to taxis en route to glamorous destinations. Then I watch to see what the weather will do. In the past thirteen years it has rained more often on Memorial Day than it has not. I meanwhile catch up on things I need to do--like sleep and laundry.
What I like most about Memorial Day is that it is such an absurd hero of the calendar, assuming its gratuitous place in the year, struggling to be what it cannot be, and to do what it can do only with luck --provide a worthy introduction to the summer for which it comes a month early. Memorial Day is the holiday that pushes and overachieves. It demonstrates the American penchant for coaxing nature into a new order that is unnecessary even if it might be more convenient, like damming great rivers and draining great swamps. Dedicated to freedom, rooted in chaos, steeped in stress, we retain a poignant attachment to order and balance, an affinity which Memorial Day expresses. Do we need an unofficial start to summer that is a month early--a marker to balance The 4th of July and Labor Day? No, but it would be nice. So we force an unreliable spring day to be the first unofficial day of summer. Then we proceed to feel miserable and betrayed when it lets us down.
Memorial Day is a thoroughly human invention: paradoxical, whimsical and grim. It gratifies our need for pleasure while calling itself a day of patriotic mourning. It bespeaks the child in us that cannot, will not wait, that demands a summer holiday NOW although summer is a month away. It springs from the stubborn need that compels boys to play basketball in darkness and rain and grown men to hit golf balls in the snow. This holiday does not commemorate youthful romps any more than it honors fallen heroes. It epitomizes the rashness, impatience and hopefulness with which we view ourselves and our lives, as well as our frivolous genius for bending anything to our stubborn will. The failure of Memorial Day to fulfill the puerile yearnings we force upon it may be what the memorial is all about.
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