Memorial Day Observances-Past and Present
Tim and I recently arrived home from the Memorial Day service in our neighborhood. Twenty-seven years ago a group of neighbors interested in the historical significance of our community began a Memorial Day service in a small cemetery named the Brooklyn Centre Burial Ground. Those same neighbors gather at the bases of the flagpole and a plaque that rededicates the cemetery. Each year there are new faces added and older faces that have disappeared but it is a time when for a few minutes we in our community remember those who gave their lives so that we may remain free. One thing missing from this Memorial Day Service is always the absence of “Taps” and each year I vow to drag out my trumpet, dust it off and take it with me to play. The playing of “Taps” is a significant part of any Memorial Day service. And so, “Taps” led me to the memories of my past and the Memorial Day Parades in my hometown of Shreve.
Each year, the Memorial Day Parade was a highlight in my hometown. My family had a significant history with the parade. My father was a member of the American Legion Color Guard along with two of his cousins. My uncle shouted off the cadence for the color guard and the twenty-one-gun salute to come soon after at the town cemetery where the parade would end. My aunt Martha was a member of the American Legion Auxiliary and her group of ladies sold poppies and marched in the parade dressed in Navy Blue uniforms that included capes and hats. My aunt Dadie organized the Girl Scout Troops into straight rows to honor our country’s dead and wounded. Her husband, my Uncle Clayton, had the spiffiest National Guard Unit in Ohio with all of the Medical ambulances and jeeps that a kid could hope to see. I think that one year we even had a tank or two but that might be the meanderings of an overactive childhood imagination.
I marched in those parades as a girl scout when I was a child, but then when I was a teenager I became a member of the high school marching band. It was a great honor to be chosen to play “Taps” at the conclusion of the ceremony at the local cemetery. Usually, one trumpeter had this distinction, but one year, Mr. Carpenter, our band director decided it would be more dramatic to have an echo after the initial playing. Imagine my surprise and delight when he chose me to be the echo. Not only, was this a great honor but also I would be playing a duet with a senior that I had had a crush on for years. Did I say that this honor had been bestowed on a lonely freshman—her first year ever to march in the Memorial Day Parade as a band member.
My elation over this selection began to lose its luster when my “crush” suggested that I climb a barbed wire fence to enter a pasture, walk across that pasture and hide behind a knoll so that I “truly” would sound like an echo. Well, not wanting to lose my chance at playing, I agreed and started the trek across the pasture. I hunkered down behind that hillock to wait for my cue. Forget hearing the speeches or seeing the honored veteran of the year lay the wreath at the base of the flagpole, but I was ready and waiting. And then, I heard the hoof steps and a crunching sound that sounded like cows chewing their cud. It couldn’t be, but it was. I turned to see fifteen to twenty cows staring me with bovine interest. I almost but didn’t run screaming from that pasture. I AM DEATHLY AFRAID OF COWS. I have good reason, but that story will wait for another walk down memory lane.
What to do, what to do. Would they stampede at the 21-gun salute or would they wait to trample me when I played my first notes. No way to tell what is inside a bovine mind. Well, while I pondered this conundrum I missed my first cue to be the echo. I recovered quickly, and very softly, very faintly began to play “Taps”. They watched; they listened; they chewed. I survived.
I climbed over the fence to join my band mates and the adulation of my band director. My crush was none too happy because he felt that he had been upstaged by a lowly freshman. My mother and father raced to my side with them both telling me how wonderful it all had been. “Not a dry eye in the place”, my dad said. My mother agreed. Knowing my emotional dad I doubted that he had seen anything through the haze of tears that welled in his eyes each and every year, but my mom I could count on to have looked for the reaction of the crowd. When I related the story of how and why my trumpet playing had been “as if it were Gabriel playing”, one of the local ministers had described it in those terms, my dad said, “Well, Cat, you have always been lucky”. I never asked him in what way did he consider me lucky because the cows hadn’t stampeded or for one day I had played way better than my talents would suggest. Knowing my dad, he meant a little bit of both.