Day 1223 – Memorial Day and Pandora’s Box
Monday May 25, 2020
160 Days until the election on November 3rd
240 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
I just watched a show about the life of Margaret Mitchell. She wrote “Gone With The Wind” by starting at the end, writing the last chapter first. And so I will begin my memories of Memorial Day in a similar way, with what I remembered first, which was the thing that happened last when I was a kid.
It was the soda truck.
Every year on Memorial Day we would go into town to watch the parade, which ended at the Community Center, the old Governor’s Mansion. While the adults were listening to speeches on the front steps we kids were around back where the soda truck was. It was a square flatbed with side fences piled high with crates of glass bottles of cold soda. We knew that the minute the speeches were over in the front the two young men guarding all those cold sodas would start handing them out. It was chaos when that happened. I remember some kids putting their thumb over the top and shaking the bottle and then squirting their buddies. It seemed wasteful and disrespectful.
There were men walking around in their uniforms from World War II and I guess the Korean War as well. I remember Mr. Myrick was often the speaker on the front steps. He wore a tan uniform, not fancy, but clean and well pressed. He had a quiet manner, quiet but intense.
The Memorial Day Parade started on the street next to the graveyard on the far end of town. When I became a scout I marched in the parade. We formed up there and went over the hill where the British had set up during The Battle of Ridgefield passing first by Colonel Sirena’s house on the right. He had a curved reddish pink driveway and was reputed to be in The John Birch Society. Ridgefield had the strongest chapter. On the left at the top of the hill was Casagmo. It was a huge orange brick mansion. I remember going into the barns of Casagmo. They were for horses. There were big ribbons from shows on the wooden entry walls. I never saw anyone there. The house, as far as I knew, was abandoned. Later, squatters started fires in it. Eventually, it was torn down and replaced with high end condos.
The Parade continued down Main Street toward the business district, passing first The Elms Inn on the right and then the Ballard estate on the right. We’d march through the two or three block business area leaving Saint Stephens on the right and the Community Center on the left. We’d go down to the Congregational Church and turn around the big horse fountain in the Y junction.
When we were little kids we used to go to the Inkster’s house which was on the rise next to The Keeler Tavern and sit and watch the parade from that vantage point. Later the house was owned by the Minots. In order to make the turn the parade had to move to the right half of the road. It would march around the fountain counter clockwise and head back up Main Street to The Community Center. This meant the head of the parade passed the tail. There were always two marching bands in the parade. My brother and I used to like to run to the point where the two bands passed each other and were side by side. The clash of the two tunes was what we wanted to hear.
The Keeler Tavern, by the way, is where the Revolutionary troops were set up. In the back of the tavern you can still see a canon ball that the British fired upon the American troops; if you know where to look and which shingle to remove.
At the end of the parade came the fire trucks and behind them the kids on their bicycles decked out in red, white, and blue bunting in the spokes. The really cool kids had clipped a playing card to the front fork of their bike so that the card hit the spokes and made a clicking sound. They were a ragtag bunch, and we envied them.
One year as the fire trucks were coming down toward the fountain they got a call for a fire and had to jump out of the parade and with sirens blaring they left – somehow, I don’t remember how.
I do remember feeling a sense of pride and “can-do-it-tiveness.” We had won World War II. There was a sense of optimism. People talked about the GI Bill and how it helped that generation go to college. How they were the best students the professors had ever seen. Housing was being built out on Long Island and everywhere. A house cost twenty five thousand (or was it fifty?) Whatever it was I remember it being equivalent to a person’s salary for a year in a good paying job.
Polio had been stopped, as had many other diseases with antibiotics. We were discovering things like DNA and a challenge had been made to go to the Moon. We were proud.We were all one. We felt there was nothing we could not accomplish. We had the scientists, the engineers, the gumption, the knowhow – It was a great time to be alive.
People talked about FDR and Ike, about the Depression and how they got through it, about the World War but only a little bit. Most of what I knew about the war came from Walter Cronkite’s narration of black and white films from the war on a show called The Twentieth Century. There were still people alive from The First World War. I remember when LIFE Magazine announced the death of the last survivor from The Civil War. He was a young bugler, now age 96 or so.
People were talking about buying Army Surplus stuff. Jeeps in a box were $125. There was all kinds of army green stuff. Metal boxes, canvas canteen sacks, if only one could figure out how to use the stuff.
Yes, it was a different time. A time of pride, a time of being in it all together.
Today? Today we have a president who has failed in his most basic responsibility – to keep us safe. He doesn’t know how. He wants the stage, but not the headache. The reality of the job eludes him. He has no idea. Every day we hear how we have shrunk from another responsibility. Rather than stepping into the breech and leading, this president has told others it is their job and criticized them when it reflects badly on him This president has undertaken the biggest assault on our government and our way of life. We are not acting like the great country we can be. Instead, we are viewed with abhorrence and dismay around the world. We are treated like a third world country and cautions are being raised by others about us. Us! The leaders of the free world! But alas, no longer. Our president has turned his back on them, and us with a “you figure it out” attitude. Meanwhile, we tries vainly to take credit for that which he claims to have done, but hasn’t.
The phony and the fraud are exposed everyday, and everyday we lose a bit more of our pride and our dignity.
This virus has exposed our weaknesses and we have the challenge in front of us. To rebuild, to fight, and to make this country and the world a better place.
160 Days until the election on November 3rd
240 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
PS This billboard used to say “FREEDOM”. A hurricane blew down half of it. Now it only says “FREE.” The body language of the people pictured is very weird, in a darkly Freudian way.
