Memorial Day officially kicks off the summer vacation season, when we bask at the beach, or read books by the pool, or hike in the mountains, or explore new destinations. A vacation, if we take the meaning of the word seriously, is a time when we empty out all the routine stuff of our everyday lives, in order to make vacant our homes and offices, maybe even our minds.
A vacation also requires that we figure out what to put back into our minds and homes and offices when we return. Does everything go back into the same place? Or do things look different now? Summertime, while it invites us to enjoy simple pleasures and common delights, also compels us to ask complicated questions about how we live and what we are doing.
Several years ago, I happened to attend a quintessential small-town Memorial Day parade. There were ten fire trucks, along with three ambulances, one marching band, four scout troops, three antique cars, and a phalanx of retired soldiers from the local American Legion post marching in time, followed by the women of the American Legion Auxiliary, matching them step for step. Main Street was lined with spectators of all ages, many of them children waving American flags.
The parade went past once, then circled around the block and came by for a second time, finally stopping at the far end of Main Street in front of the American Legion Hall. There a retired soldier in uniform reminded us of what Memorial Day is meant to memorialize: the men and women who fought and died on behalf of our country and our freedom. After his speech, seven soldiers fired three volleys into the air—a twenty-one gun salute—and a lone bugler played Taps. Then, the official summer season having begun, we all went off to eat barbecue and drink iced tea.
There is something both ironic and appropriate that summer begins with Memorial Day and the playing of Taps. Both originated in the 1860s, as the United States was recovering from the long and bloody Civil War between the North and the South. The dead soldiers were being buried, and surviving soldiers were coming home. Henry Welles, a drugstore owner in Waterloo, New York suggested that all the shops in town close for one day to honor the soldiers who had been killed in the Civil War and buried in the Waterloo cemetery.
At about the same time, Retired Major General Jonathan Logan planned another ceremony for the soldiers who survived the war. He led the veterans through town to the cemetery to decorate their comrades’ graves with flags. The townspeople called it Decoration Day.
In Logan’s proclamation of what came to be called Memorial Day, he declared: “The thirtieth of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country and during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance, no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”
A few years before that proclamation, Taps had been adapted from a French tune by Daniel Butterfield, a Union General in the Army of the Potomac, in order to honor his Brigade following their heroism during a battle in Virginia. Like Memorial Day itself, these twenty-four notes invite the living to pause and measure their own lives by the standard set by men and women who gave their all to defend and protect what they deeply valued. Soon after Taps was composed, words were put with the music: “Day is done, gone the sun, from the hills, from the lake, from the skies. All is well, safely rest. God is nigh.”
Most children who line the main streets of our nation on Memorial Day have no idea why men and women in uniform march with the fire trucks. Many of the adults have forgotten as well. Memorial Day invites us to remember those whose wartime commitment and courage make our peacetime ignorance and forgetting possible. It also invites us to pause and reflect on the ideals to which we have committed our lives. What’s worth dying for? What’s worth living for?
Summertime, in and among the barbecues and beaches and books well read, invites us to step back from everyday routines and do the same. You and I may not be called to give up our lives for some worthy cause. But that doesn’t mean we are not called to give our lives to some worthy purpose. What are we living for?