It's Memorial Day.  I skipped the mattress sales and went to the cemetery. 

A bunch of folks showed up to honor America's fallen soldiers. 




The VFW guys  pulled color guard duty.   The two gentlemen in back are Pearl Harbor survivors.  I'll do the math for you - Pearl Harbor was in 1941 - sixty seven years ago.  These veterans have earned the right to wear those Hawaiian shirts under their white windbreakers.    



Memorial Day boilerplate followed: The Invocation, Pledge of Allegiance, and National Anthem - sung by the Saddleback Master Chorale with a slow, haunting lilt that evoked somber images of post-battle Gettysburg. 

Richard Pignone of VFW Post 2660 read "The Story of the Poppy," a simple little poem.  If you or I had read this tale of a "fair-haired soldier" who didn't make it home it would have sounded hokey.  But in his reading, told to an inquisitive child from the soldier's mother's point of view, the words caught in Mr. Pignone's throat.  They meant something to him.  Something powerful.  In the audience it was hanky time.

Then the Chorale sang "Shenandoah," a gray, overcast tune - probably the original B-side to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."

The day peaked when Cpl. USMC Ehren Terbeek gave the Memorial Day Address:



This kid is class.  He's finishing up at Saddleback College and entering Chapman University in the fall.  And, by the way, he did multiple tours in Iraq, participating in the original battle for Baghdad and the bloody fight for Fallujah.   Like the great soldiers before him he doesn't share the gory details.  He doesn't explain how he got his Purple Heart or why he's had several back surgeries.  Rather, he talks about his friends who went down those dangerous streets with him and didn't come back.  He talks about their courage, their personalities, their families, and about the voids left in the wake of their deaths.  And he says not a day goes by without him thinking of reenlisting and returning to his place on the line. 

Epiphany - The bugler wrapped things up with "Taps," the last song on every military man's set list.  The sun sets on each day and eventually, each life.  Jesus, is that today's lesson?  I wanted something more upbeat, but surrounded by witnesses to seven decades of war I wasn't sure I would find it.  These men had seen humanity in its ugliest guises.  But had they not also seen the best side of our natures?  The most heroic?  I finally found the punctuation mark that this day deserved, a bright red exclamation point sitting in the parking lot:



I know, it's just a Mini Cooper.  But check out the license plate, jerkies:



That's how this Pearl Harbor survivor rolls.  Sixty seven years ago he was minding his own business, sleeping off an umbrella drink hangover in his bunk in the Schofield Barracks, when the Japanese Navy tried to blow him up.  He could be taking life easy now, rolling down the boulevard in the hushed comfort of a Buick La Sabre.  But this guy still wants to feel the world beneath him.  He doesn't see the curves that life throws our way as bad things -  to him they are reasons to accelerate.  That's the lesson of this Memorial Day.  Every day ends with "Taps" but every morning brings a fresh blast of "Reveille."