I think of it every year at this time.
If you don't know how to properly fold an American flag for this Memorial Day weekend, the animated diagram above shows you how.
The good news is that I've known how since I was ten years old. Was I some sort of an Army brat?
Nope, I learned it all from Grandma.
In the house I grew up in on South 15th Avenue in Mount Vernon, New York, we had a big honking flag pole cemented right in the middle of the front yard. It actually stretched past our apartment on the second floor. It was as big as any you might find in front of the most important of Federal buildings. But it was all ours. Right there where my grandmother could easily see it from her first floor living room window.
More importantly, we used it on all the national holidays. Come Memorial Day or the Fourth of July or even Veteran's Day in November, I would hear the hallway closet downstairs creak open. I'd envision the boxes being moved this way or that. The smell of mothballs would waft up to the second floor.
Yep, Grandma was rooting around for the American flag again.
I'd walk around the neighborhood and not see a lot of the same patriotism on these holidays. Certainly, not an American flag being hoisted up a huge pole at the crack of dawn. But, that's what my grandparents did like clockwork.
After my grandfather died, I could no longer exist in mere passive curiosity. My grandmother would not allow it.
"You gonna help me now."
Okay, Grandma. I figured it was only going to be a slight diversion to my day of play. Yet, I had no idea how seriously she took this ceremony. The way in which the flag was unfolded. How it was handled with the utmost of care.
And, at the end of the day, the precise folding of the banner. Military style. To the strictest of code. My first few attempts did not go well.
"No, no, no. Not that way. This way!"
The words had a sharp tone. Grandma meant business with this. And I was treating it all like Gomer Pyle, USMC.
After a while, I got it. And we responded on every holiday. Granted we weren't a bunch of Marines following the flag over President John F. Kennedy's casket. But Grandma and I got into a neat rhythm when it was time to put the flag away. We did it as flawlessly as we could. Moreover, we did it with the proper amount of respect.
Several years later, I asked my father about that tradition. What was I missing? What was behind the flag ceremony?
"Well, you do know that's the flag that covered your uncle's casket?"
A funeral held in the south of France where he was killed in the waning days of World War II. A ceremony that nobody in the family had attended. For my grandmother's son. The person I was ultimately named after.
No, Dad, I didn't know that.
In this recent picture of that house years after I left it, the flagpole stands as tall as ever.
Without the flag. Without me and Grandma standing at the base, momentarily watching it proudly flap in the gentle breeze.
Except for the memories, that flagpole stands. Simply and utterly just there.
Dinner last night: Lots of party snacks at R10 Social House.
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