11. Memorial Day

 Memorial Day Story

I was a kid in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

My family: Dad and Mom, Big Brother Joe and Little Brother Jack, lived on a half-acre we called "The Three Willow Ranch".

In those long-ago days Memorial Day was called Decoration Day and it was a custom for many people to decorate the graves of their departed family members and friends. It was not a fun celebration day like Dia de los Muertos for Mexicans, but a solemn day for us gringos.

Starting when I was about ten years old I helped Mom decorate Baby Steve's grave every year for a few years . 

Baby Steve was our fourth brother who died about five years before I was born of infant bed syndrome--one minute a healthy baby, the next a dead baby--a big shock to my young parents and never forgotten.

Mom loved roses and we had lots of them--a circular flowerbed-full of whites and reds set in the middle of the front lawn--an eight-foot high  hedge of pink climbers running for a hundred feet along the east side of the house and big yellow pink and red mixed with larkspur in a big garden by the driveway--this was before Grandpa Clayton built the carport. And there were even several huge rambling rose bushes covered with sprays of blooms back beyond the chicken pens on a trellis  by the storm cellar.

So Mom and I would bag  lots of mainly pink rose petals and cut piles of blossoms of all colors , put the cut roses in cans of water in the back seat floor of the old Chrysler and she would drive us out to the big walled municipal graveyard which had two sections--an expensive "eternal care" one with mowed, irrigated lawn  and a bigger one for us common people with hard dirt and drifted sand.


There was always a search for the right grave among the tatty metal name plates and dried-up wooden crosses for the unmarked one Mom remembered and then, using spare tin cans for tools, we would pile up some dirt into  a baby grave-sized mound and cover it with rose petals. We would set big tin cans into the dirt at "head' and "foot" and create a lavish display of all colors of roses--cut blossoms and sprays of leaves and blooms.


Before we drove away Mom would send me to look for water to put in the cans to preserve the bloom's freshness for a little longer in the heat. The water came from a spigot I would find sticking out of the dirt near some tamarack trees.


I don't remember Joe or Jack ever being there and Dad never came--I think now maybe it was because of some unhealed wound of unforgotten grief for him.

I didn't much like to do this chore and I was glad when it was over, though it was never weeping and wailing sad--just sort of a businesslike something you did every year as a duty. 

When I was grown up and  asked Mom about Steve she said that he would have been just the right age to be in the New Mexico National Guard for the disastrous Bataan Death March in the Philippines  in which so many of Albuquerque's young men died--so maybe his painless death as a baby spared him from all that suffering.

Taos Cemetery. (Tomasito photo)

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