This season: Listening for ancestors on Decoration Day

QUASQUETON - Among the few things that have improved with age is my appreciation of Memorial Day.

For my youthful taste, the funereal air of what was then known as Decoration Day was all too somber for the holiday that marks the unofficial beginning of summer.

The flowers, the martial music, the speeches and prayers, the droning of the names of deceased military veterans, all within the confines of a greensward full of dead people - it seemed like church times funeral squared.

In my hometown, the annual celebration on the last Monday of May always has begun with a slightly homespun parade led by as many as two dozen members of American Legion Post 434, walking a little livelier than they might normally to the rat-a-tat of the high school band's snare drums.

Flag-decked golf carts, flower-bearing children and members of the Post 434 Ladies Auxiliary in their red-white-and-blue T-shirts make up the rest of the procession, which is greeted along the route by onlookers saluting the passing colors.

The ceremony at the cemetery, unchanged in my lifetime, goes off like clockwork: The school band plays 'The Star Spangled Banner”; everyone pledges allegiance to the flag; the local pastor invokes God's blessings on the proceedings; the youth of the community lay fresh-picked flowers at the base of the now 100-year-old Civil War monument; a pair of young teens recite 'In Flanders Fields” and the response; a Legionnaire reads the lengthening list of military veterans (now over 200) interred in the cemetery; a local dignitary (or me, in the event one can't be found - the case for the past dozen years) delivers more or less appropriate remarks; and the Legion color guard fires off a three-round salute to the honored veterans.

Then we all march back downtown to the east bank of the Wapsipinicon, where after a brief tribute to veterans lost at sea, we adjourn to the Legion Hall for fellowship and the Auxiliary's roast beef dinner.

What once seemed square and boring now, with the passage of many years, seems important and moving.

During what seemed in my youth to be the interminable reading of the cemetery's interred veterans, men who fought in ancient wars, I stayed awake by listening for the names of my ancestors: my great-grandfathers, H.H. Love and Daniel Kautz, Civil War veterans; and great-uncle Ralph Love, World War I veteran.

As time flew, however, the list got longer with the names of people I knew personally. Of the 70 World War II veterans buried in the cemetery, one was my dad, Raymond Love, laid to rest in 1990, and most of the others were friends, neighbors and fellow members of Post 434.

Those World War II veterans, the mainstay of Memorial Day services for more than a generation, are all but gone, as are most of the town's Korean War veterans, 23 of whom are buried in the cemetery.

Even the ranks of my contemporaries, the Vietnam vets, are thinning with 18 of us, including Richard Payne and Cecil Olsen, killed in action, among the more than 2,000 souls whose remains molder in the ever-expanding cemetery. Some day my name will be read.

In this town, as in many others throughout the state and nation, the cemetery is the common denominator that has bound this community together for generations.

We gather there to support friends, neighbors and relatives as they lay loved ones to rest, and we gather there on Memorial Day to decorate the graves of our own loved ones and to remember the 10 percent of the grave occupants who served their country in the military.

The same evolution of Memorial Day thoughts and feelings that I experienced has begun with my 30-year-old son, Fred, who two years ago was roused from sleep earlier than he would have preferred to accompany me on my annual deposition of flowers on the graves of our ancestors. He told it better than I could have in the lyrics of a song he wrote a couple days later:

'A rainstorm was threatening on Decoration Day

My old man shook me outta bed

Said get your shoes, come on downstairs

It's time you learned where this family lays to rest its dead

We took that old pickup to the graveyard outside town

The entire ride, neither of us spoke

My old man had some flowers he grew with his own hands

And he placed them by the tombstones of his folks

And there lies my great-great-granddad; I never knew

He marched down to Dixie in Union blue

Had 13 kids and he had a farm and until the day he died

He never quite recovered from his wounds

We planted all them flowers and got back to the truck

The radio was playing a sad old country tune

My old man squeezed my hand and put the truck in gear

Said, 'The rain's gonna start falling soon.”