Our Memorial Day Weekend

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. For me, it is one of my favorite family holidays. It’s a time of near-closure and the beginning of summer.

Our older children are about to start final exams, and our younger ones are nearly done with school, too. Our oldest child will be going for a month to France and is preparing to go.

This weekend, so far, has been a roving schedule of mini-groupings: out for a snack with one child, playing squash with two others (and, ice cream cones thereafter), and tomorrow, golf and tennis with a sub-group of the children. Tonight, my wife and I are going to meet up with some close friends for a dinner out.

So, it is already a family-oriented, peaceful and outdoorsy weekend, which is my favorite kind of leisure.

Amidst all this, I also will be remembering those who fought for freedom and didn’t return home. As I’ve written previously here, Band of Brothers is a very moving book.

It is non-fiction, and the book follows a company of U.S. paratroopers, from training to D-Day to the end of WWII. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg produced a mini-series from the book. The D-Day landing scene is at the bottom of this post (or, click here). It is short and worth watching.

It is a very inspiring notion to fly into a hailstorm of flak and explosions, surpress your instincts for self-preservation, and then jump out of an airplane into the darkness and who knows what awaits you in the air or on the ground, if you should be so lucky as to parachute down safely. All in the name of justice and freedom.

Last, I later will do what I always do on Memorial Day: put up the U.S. flag near our door, with gratitude to all of our soldiers who didn’t return home. They are worth remembering and honoring.

The deserved to live long and happy lives, in peace.

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