On Saturday the Trivia question on the board at my neighborhood coffee shop read: “What was the original name for Memorial Day?” Someplace in the recesses of my caffeine deprived mind, the wheels began to work. “My parents always referred to it as Decoration Day.”, I answered. Ding, ding, ding! Correct answer, the barista replied.

I sat down to enjoy my morning coffee in the chair that has become familiar to me. The one that allows me to see the early comings and goings of those in the blocks that ring our little homeland. My body was in the chair but my mind was on time-travel mode and I was hurdling back to those sweltering,southern Ohio, May days of my childhood. Those days in which school was on only perfunctory attendance, a time for cleaning out desks and little celebrations of another grade completed. Those days when summer and all its promise loomed just within my reach.

But first, before the summer, came Decoration Day. There were flowers to be purchased or wreaths to be created. My mother was always very particular about what was appropriate to be laid on the graves of my grandparents, my uncle. Nothing too gaudy or showy but still colorful. The procession to the various cemeteries was a family affair. There was no chance of ‘getting out of it’ unless you were ‘on your death bed’. This was the day set aside to decorate the graves of those who had died and everyone’s presence was needed.

We visited my maternal grandmother and grandfathers’s grave first. This idyllic setting with its wooden, white church was set in a rather hilly area. Most of the gravestones carried the stamp of their Welsh heritage: Jones, Davis, Evans, Williams, Howell,over and over. My Gram and Pappy with the name Lambert seemed kind of exotic. As we placed the flowers, we also looked around the gray stone for stray weeds that the caretakers had missed. There would be the requisite clucking of tongues in invisible reprimand. While there at the graveside the adults would sometimes fall into conversation with others decorating graves nearby. It became a kind of reunion of people who may just have come to town for the weekend or an extension of a conversation that may have started in the grocery store between people who saw one another nearly daily. Yet everyone was there for the decorating.

After that there was often a parade. Short and consisting of the high school marching band and the veterans that marched in their uniforms from whatever war they had been involved in. As a teenager I was a part of this band but as a child I was just a bystander like everyone else. The parade ended at another cemetery where my paternal grandparents were buried along with an uncle who had died when I was in kindergarten. It was at this place where the full ceremony to honor the military dead took place. We all gathered around the flagpole for the gun salute. I never became accustomed to those gun sounds. They always jarred me to my marrow. Particularly during the Viet Nam war, the sound of these guns shooting so near by brought tears and rage to my young body. Too many from our town had served and too many had returned scarred for life in visible but mostly invisible ways. Finally there was the playing of taps, that mournful trumpet sound with its echo played from a far off place, over a hill in the distance that capped the drama we were all playing out.

As a child I did not understand what all this meant. As a teenager and young adult, I came to understand it all through the lens of the turbulence in which I was being shaped, by a world that was becoming less assured of what war and its consequences meant. As an adult that confusion continues.

My children and many of their age have no idea what Decoration Day is. They have no memory of visiting cemeteries the way one might visit a relative’s house. They may never worry over what wreath or what flowers to place on a grave. I am not sure what to make of all that. Whether it is simply the evolution of the way in which we honor those who have gone before or a silent act of the avoidance of death. All I know if that these were acts, rituals, that shaped me somehow and I am thankful for them. They helped me sort out some important things and tied me to a community, both living and dead, that I treasure. Whether Memorial or Decoration, it is an important day.