May 27, 2004

Don't you just love holidays? Every month has at least one--except maybe August--and May makes up by having several. I remember rising early on May Day and picking violets from the grass to deposit surreptitiously on the doorsteps of my neighbors.

Then came Mother's Day when we would help deliver corsages to all the mothers in the church. At the very end came Memorial Day, a holiday to honor the dead, which we did by putting flowers from my grandfather's magnificent yard on the graves of my brother and other departed family members. And after the decorating was done, we had the day off, the first real taste of summer, a promise of dog days to come even if school wasn't officially over for another week or two.

Now that I'm older, I have come to realize that Memorial Day is more than just the first day I can wear shorts to work. It's much more than the opening day of boating and fishing season. Especially in the last few years, it's become a day when I can reflect on the great gift given to me by the men and women we honor by decorating their graves. Not just anyone who has died, but specifically those who have given their lives in the service of our nation.

I've come to realize that freedom isn't free and it doesn't come cheap.

Freedom comes at the expense of the lives and innocence of young men and women who willingly put it all on the line to make America the one nation on earth that everybody else wants to be like.

They go away as children and come back as adults, forever changed and largely unwilling or unable to share the events which changed them. They come home and take off the uniform and become invisible, woven back into the fabric of our society, making us stronger than we look, like a Tyvek envelope, the ones you can't get open without scissors.

You can see them if you really look. They're the men who walk a little straighter, reminiscent of marching in columns. They're the ones who hold their ball caps over their hearts when the national anthem is played. But, the best place to see them is at the VA clinics.

There are two relatively close to Celina. I am humbled and awed every time I travel there with my dad. In fact, it moves me so that I think a visit to the VA hospital should be a required field trip for every civics class in America.

This year, we will honor those who served in WWII by dedicating a long-overdue memorial in Washington, D.C. These men and women, whom we are losing at a rapid rate, held the line against tyranny, and we all are the better for it. In their footsteps have followed those who fought wars in Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention countless other conflicts in which America took the fight to the enemy in the defense of liberty for people all over the globe.

So, as you're loading up the cooler for that first Monday at the lake, take a minute to be grateful for the rights and privileges we all enjoy. Wave a flag, listen to the band and watch a parade of old men in ill-fitting uniforms. Visit the museum on the square, which will be decked out in stars and stripes and displays of your neighbors who have served. Welcome to Celina.

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