Veterans

In the village of Skaneateles, NY, at the base of its gorgeous lake, is a war memorial. Bronze plaques list the names of those who died. The first one, dedicated after World War I, is simple in its optimism. Above the names is its title: “The World War.” And then, of course, in a steady stream of more plaques next to it, comes the truth. Still, I love that bright anticipation. If only it were true.

I posted this blog entry about growing up in Massapequa with Ron Kovic last year on the Fourth of July, his birthday. And because this weekend is Memorial Day, and Memorial Day is more than picnics and mattress sales, I’m placing it here again.

***

“I don’t like this,” my mother said as she set the dinner table. “It’s getting to be a bad habit.”

The rest of my family out-voted her. So my brother placed the portable black and white TV on a snack table in the corner of the kitchen.

It was fall, 1967, and I was a senior in high school. Between bites of dinner and sips of milk, my family watched the news unfolding from Vietnam. As a student who thought history was her best subject, I was interested in the logistics of it all, the politics. My ability to watch young men being ripped apart on a 16-inch screen and then say things like, “Please pass the potatoes,” evidently didn’t bother me.

Then Ron Kovic got shot.

Ron Kovic grew up one block over and two blocks up from our house. He and his friends were a staple of my childhood. For one summer I worshiped his broad-shouldered body as he played ball every day in the neighborhood. He was — as were many others — the older boy who never looked my way. For three hot and humid months that year, I made up a reason to walk past his house ten times a day. I hoped for a “hello.” I never got a nod.

I’d lost track of him when he graduated from Massapequa High School in 1964. I had no idea he’d become a Marine. His little sister was at our bus stop on Broadway, but by the rules that governed bus stop protocol, I couldn’t talk to her because she was younger.

And then one afternoon in January, 1968, I saw his sister sobbing on the bus ride home from school, hunched over in her seat. Her friends crowded around her, and I heard one of them say, “Her brother got shot in Vietnam.”

Starting that day, I had two images of Ron Kovic that I couldn’t reconcile. In the first, he wore his letter sweater with the blue and gold M. He had a crew cut and was tan and smiling. In the second — only a few years beyond that — he lay in St. Albans Naval Hospital, paralyzed from the chest down.

In 1976, when Ron wrote about his life in Born on the Fourth of July, he graced the front page of The New York Times Book Review. He was renewed, strong in his anti-war convictions, still handsome. My brother bought a copy of the book for me and walked around the corner to the Kovic’s house and asked him to sign it.

“He was very pleasant,” my brother told me. “We talked for a long time. I asked him, but he said he doesn’t remember you.”

When you’re the cool kid on the block, you don’t recall the skinny 13-year-old in the shadows, even if she is adoring your every move. And that wasn’t the big role Ron Kovic was going to play in my life anyway.

January, 1968, my family stopped watching the Vietnam War unfold on the TV screen at dinner. I no longer needed Walter Cronkite to shepherd me through the Tet Offensive or the DMZ. Ron Kovic — that beautiful boy from Toronto Avenue who did perfect handstands — took over the job.

If I questioned what war was, or what it did, my answer was close by now. Two blocks away. At the bus stop. Every morning when I looked into his sister’s eyes.

On the Memorial Days of my childhood, I’d walk three blocks to Broadway and stake out my spot in front of Sparky’s Barbershop, waiting for the parade to begin. The booming sound of the marching bands gave me butterflies. I envied the girls who could walk and catch their batons in the air at the same time. My dad taught us to stand each time the flag came by, not just the first one.

And then we’d go home and eat hamburgers and potato salad. Second only to Christmas, maybe, Memorial Day was right up there for me.

By the time I moved to Baltimore in my late 30s, the excitement reserved for holidays now belonged to my kids. Christmas was still big, of course, but they hadn’t been to many parades. And Memorial Day meant the weekend our community pool opened, an event for my children that overshadowed anything else.

Our house was near a cemetery, which I used as a geographic marker for anyone coming to visit: Go up the hill on Padonia Road. As soon as you begin to see the cemetery on the left, hang a right.

My first spring there, I was working in the garden when I thought I heard a Sousa march. It was coming from the cemetery’s direction. I had some time on my hands, I guess, because I followed the music across the street and walked through the gates. It wasn’t until I saw the wreaths and the politicians that I remembered it was Memorial Day.

I was a little ashamed of myself about that. I was the daughter and daughter-in-law of WWII veterans, men, who though they rarely spoke of it, had both served proudly in the Pacific. Back in Massapequa, I’d always been the first to get to Broadway, making sure I had my spot to watch the color guard and applaud the veterans who would wave from convertibles. I should have thought of Memorial Day as something more than an extra day in the garden.

I took a spot in the back where I wouldn’t be noticed. I watched the wreaths solemnly placed, and — with what I hoped was the right amount of decorum, despite the slightly dirty knees of my jeans — I waited until the bagpipers filed out.

That was my first Memorial Day in my new city. There would be lots more of them — I lived in that house a long time — but none would ever happen again the last weekend in May. I went back to the cemetery often. And I never left without learning something.

I found the grave of a man who sang in my church choir. I watched him — in his blue robe — carry the bass section single-handedly. His life was filled with tremendous accomplishments, personal and professional. The plaque that documents his life chooses to tell the world he was a WWII veteran. I never knew.

Another man’s grave is adorned with a commemoration of Iwo Jima. He had lived a long life and died at a dignified age. Now here he was, wanting us to remember that part of his story. So on an ordinary Wednesday, with no Sousa march, no honor guard, I did.

There is a whole section for soldiers who died in Vietnam — all men my age — who would by now have grandchildren and be looking forward to retirement. I could always tell when their parents had been there. In spring they had carefully manicured the little lawns that bordered their sons’ graves. They rearranged the flowers. In winter, they left tiny Christmas wreaths and jolly miniature snowmen they stuck in the ground.

Being there reminded me that these were ordinary people called to do the extraordinary. I don’t know how they mustered up the courage to charge a hill or hold a line somewhere far from home when they missed their families and feared everything around the next corner.

I only knew that when I was there, I was in the presence of those who figured out a way. Men, who like my dad, said, “Remember, we stand up every time the flag goes by, not just the first one.” Or men like the ones at rest in the cemetery.

It’s true that little girl from Massapequa who stood cheering for the parade didn’t understand the meaning of Memorial Day. But she tried to make up for it on all the other Memorial Days when she lived in the house near the cemetery. On the afternoons when she walked through those gates.