My mother was old school. Every year when Memorial Day came around she would say that that it was formerly called Decoration Day. The day when Americans would decorate the graves of the country’s fallen soldiers. At some point it was renamed Memorial Day and has slowly morphed into the unofficial beginning of summer, a three day weekend for many, the day when wearing white shoes and pants is fashionably correct.

Here where I live, nestled along the shore of Lake Michigan in our urban city park, there was an annual kite festival during the Memorial Day weekend. The park was full of families, friend groups and others flying colorful kites. There was music and laughter under a beautiful blue sky.

A short walk to another part of the park someone had remembered it was also Decoration Day.

There at the foot of the Vietnam War Memorial, volunteers had placed American flags. One flag for each of the Wisconsin war dead in every conflict beginning with the Civil War, fluttered in the breeze.

I passed the flags of those lost in the Vietnam war. It had colored so much of my childhood and teenage years. I immediately thought of the young solder who died, the family member of one of my best friends. Tears unexpectedly came for a young man I never met.

I continued around the display. Flags for the fallen from two world wars, the Gulf War, the Civil War (the most costly in our history) and even a marker for those lives lost in peace time (623) decorating the expanse of green.

I stopped at the marker for the Korean War. I had been three years old when we took my father to the airport. I had no idea why. But I remember his mother quietly crying into her handkerchief and my own mother holding back tears as we watched him walk toward the aircraft. My dad was career military, and he was bound for Korea. But I also remember a Christmas Day some months later. My father came home. Here a marker in the Milwaukee sun informed me that 801 sons, husbands and fathers did not return to their loved ones.

So on this Memorial Day I’ll be thinking of those two sights. Laughing happy people flying kites and picnicking on a beautiful May day. And nearby the flags decorating the same park in memory of those who died making the laughter and fun possible.

Decoration Day indeed.

I’m just say’n