The Longest Weekend

Memorial Day weekend seems like the longest weekend to me. Thoughts and memories shove their way to the front of my consciousness and demand attention. In recent years I try to honor them by writing, which is why the newsletter content spikes this time of year I suppose.

When I was growing up in the 1960s it seemed like every house I visited had a picture of a young man in a uniform. Usually they were black and white, sometimes sepia toned. Some were formal portraits, some were snapshots. Some of them were bordered in black, some had black ribbons. Some of them, just the way they were placed on a mantle or sideboard, told you the story.

I have thought about the people in those pictures—and written—how I have wondered how many scientists, teachers, doctors, senators, governors, and presidents are among those pictured. How many, through their lives and through their deaths, inspired others to serve. An unrelated thought from a week or so ago sent me wondering about my father’s motivation to serve in World War II.

On the surface, my father wasn't motivated, per se, he was drafted. Once in the pool, and with documented aptitude and experience in electronics, he was snapped up by the Navy. But before he was drafted, he was exempt because he was a divinity student at Saint Stanislaw Jesuit Seminary in Florissant, Missouri. He departed the seminary in the summer of 1944, shortly before he would have taken vows as a Jesuit priest. He never said why he left, other than to briefly mention that the “real world” demanded his attention. I think the war must have part of that real world, and it wanted more from him than prayers, and reading early Greek translations of scripture, and studying Thomas Aquinas. Only recently I have wondered if his cousin’s death in an airplane crash on Saipan, only weeks before my father left the seminary, may have precipitated his decision. Carl Rieger was his first cousin and the cousin closest to him in age. In later years I recall, when my grandmother mentioned Carl, my father grew quiet, as if reflecting on old memories.

I wonder if my grandson will someday visit friends’ houses and notice photographs of young men in 1960s era uniforms, in formal portraits or snapshots in cotton sateen fatigues, maybe with the sleeves cut off. More likely they’ll be in today’s dress uniforms, or in camouflage utilities and body armor. Some of those pictures will rest on mantles, or sideboards, or hung on walls, in a particular and telling way.

For too many people, too many families, every day is Memorial Day.

There seems no way to neatly wrap this up, which may just be the reality of Memorial Day, and why it seems the longest weekend. There is no end.