I should by all rights be sleeping. It's Memorial Day. There is no seminary, no early morning meetings to get up for, no lunches to make, no fun-filled drives to Middlesex. No real reason for me to be sitting in my office but I could not sleep. My thoughts were moving at a million miles an hour and then landed like Stockton McMullin after a long jump on a single thought of personal profundity. One of the principles of measurement is that you find a constant, a fixed point in space and then you count revolutions of what you are measuring (if they are moving on one axis) as they passed the point of measurement, or let's call it the POM. For me, the D-Family POM used to be the Tokeneke Pumpkin Fair. Once a year we would ride the Ferris wheel and soar above the tree tops of our little bubbly enclave and I would have the whole family with me and I would sit up there when the Ferris wheel reached the tippy-top and think of the previous year and what we had accomplished (or not) I would mark the growth of the children, the relative happiness of each family member. Then the children grew and we stopped going to the Pumpkin fair. Then the POM switched to Christmas dinner. I would look down the table and hear the voice of my beloved Nana who would invariably say at such a gathering "My what a handsome family." Memorial Day in particular is a personal and in some ways sacred POM for me. On Memorial Day of 1977 I had awakened early just like this morning. Just like everyday Memorial day since. It's like my body has stored in it the precise time of a certain event and it marks that anniversary by waking me up at that hour each year. I was 17, a junior in High School and two years into the waiting for my parents to allow me to be baptized. I had gone to a Ray Kordsiemon's baptism a few night's previous and I dreamed it was my turn finally. My dear friend Kent performed the ordinance, my friends were there, my dream was so vivid and sweet but it was interrupted by my awakening suddenly. I felt robbed of that sweet victory when I awoke. Little did I know I was watching a trailer from the cinema of miracles my life would soon become. The sacred events of that Memorial Day morning are not ones of blog entries. Suffice to say, a few short weeks later I was baptized and in every possible way the dream was fulfilled.
In the many years that have followed Memorial Day has become also a personal memorial for me. That morning in '77, doubts were replaced by the fervent warmth of hopeful longing and years of faithful waiting were rewarded by a certainty that, like a beloved hymn suggested, All is well, all is well. Every Memorial day as I awaken I think back to that day and wonder if I have been true to my epiphany, have my words, thoughts and deeds been indicative of my gratitude? Certainly not. But I am grateful none the less for the POM memorial day offers me.
As I contemplate Emily and I sitting at the curbside and watching the '09 parade I am swept backward to the Memorial Days of my childhood. When my mother would sit rapt and teary eyed as we listened to the recitation of the names of our little town's fallen heros of Vietnam. Or one particular Memorial Day in 1968 when Martin Luther King was memorialized just a month or so after his death. Mom wept bitterly that day at the loss of one of her personal heros.
The parade will soon pass by us but even now in the stillness of the morning I hear echoes of Memorial Days past, of Sarah laughing and talking with Carly Park at the Tilley Pond Food fair, of Suzanne and I playing Lacrosse in the back yard, of Drew and I slamming the softball into each other's mitts, of C & I as brand new homeowners watching with intimidation the other sparkling Gatsbyesque Darienites and wondering how we would ever measure up. Em is one year older, one year closer to leaving the nest just as the other D girls have done. I do not feel in my mind older or even much wiser than when Sarah marched in the parade as a Brownie. When as customers of Pierce Real Estate we had our special seating, when Suzanne and I proudly marched with the Indian Princesses. When we waved to Lori Robertson playing clarinet in her Blue Wave band uniform. In a few hours we will be at the Memorial day picnic and I will see the glamorous Christensen girls who as babies I would hold and rock and take comfort in during a time of great personal sadness for me, now very grown up girls who don't even know me.
Time, like the Darien parade, marches before me but the feeling of awe and profound gratitude for all of life's blessings always well up in me on Memorial Day morning. To all our dear family and friends - a very happy Memorial Day. Count your blessings. Name them one by one.
