Memorial Day

I promised Tony and Jeff if they got up early enough on Sunday, I'd take them down to San Juan Bautista for the day to see the Mission and all that historical stuff.

Amazingly, they did get up early, so down to San Juan Bautista we went. It's about 94 miles from here.

Now San Juan Bautista is about 3 miles East of 101 and maybe 15 miles south of Gilroy. In other words, smack in the middle of nowhere. It's one of those towns that progress evaded. The Southern Pacific, and later Highway 101, bypassed it, and that's why it's so well preserved, and it hasn't grown into a sprawling dystopian nightmare like so many other Mission towns, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Los Angeles.

So anyway, we get to San Juan Bautista, and I turned off too soon. Instead of turning off where you turn off to go to the Mission and the State Park, I turned off where you go to the cemetery, which dates back to the mission era.

And, of course, it's Memorial Day weekend, so some guys from the VFW were out there putting flags on the veterans' graves. I pulled over outside the cemetery, and Tony and Jeff and I went out to pay our respects, and I'm kind of ashamed to confess that, if I hadn't have made that wrong turn, I might have forgotten why there's a Memorial Day weekend in the first place. It's a time to honor our war dead, right? And veterans in general.

Of course, it's easy to forget about all that when you see the ads in the paper and TV about the big Memorial Day sale at Sears or KMart, or the Memorial Day getaway package at Casino Flambé, which when you think about it is pretty damn crass, especially when the country's in the middle of a war, and there's 20-year-olds coming home in body bags every other day.

So I think from now on what we're going to do for Memorial Day is go out to the cemetery. Maybe go see my grandma in Mount Olivet. She was a riveter in the Richmond shipyards in WWII. I think that qualifies her for a flag! Sure, why not? And she used to hate it when I brought her flowers, too, so it's perfect. A flag, a thermos full of black coffee and a can of almond roca.

That's what Memorial Day is all about, right? Honoring people who served our Country, not getting 20 percent off on a new lawn mower.

Kurt "big daddy" True
30 may 2005