For many of us, it’s just a long, well-deserved weekend complete with camping trips, backyard barbeques with friends and family, and for some, there’s an obligatory trip to the cemetery shoe-horned in.
My childhood was full of trips to the cemetery. But there was one trip I remember vividly. We’d travelled almost an hour to my father’s hometown, and pulled into the circular gravel drive. The speed limit was 5 mph, and the crunch of rocks under the tires was so loud I had to call out names of familiar stones as I marked off the distance to ‘The Coon Plot’. Once there, we put flowers on all the graves and straightened stones that had shifted over the winter. And then my dad told me stories about the men and women commemorated by those grave markers.
One of these stories was about my Uncle Herman, who served in WWII. After the ship he was serving on sank in the Pacific Ocean, he spent time on the same island as the infamous “Pappy” Boyington. Now, I loved “Pappy” and his ill-fated group of Flying Tigers. I watched the show every week where he was played by Robert Conrad on the television series, Baa Baa Black Sheep.
So, at that tender age, I became a romance writer. The stories my dad wove that day at the cemetery that day fired my imagination. In numerous notebooks, I wrote about tropical islands, valiant men, and the women in their lives. Okay, I’ll admit, in all those stories I was the lovers they left behind and the nurses who dressed their wounds and undressed their bodies and their hearts.
At two o’clock tomorrow, when my parents are making a trip out to ‘The Coon Plot’, I’ve asked them to drop an extra rose on Uncle Herman’s grave to say thanks. I think he’ll get a kick out of the fact that because of him I write romance, and “sexy” romances at that. . . the best kind!
May 27th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
One of the memories that I’ll always carry with me about Memorial Day is when I was in junior high, the school I went to was very close - walking distance - to the National Cemetary. The student council would always go over the Friday before and put American flags on each of the headstones. I looked forward to that every year.
May 27th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Uncle Herman, the pervy inspiration. Awww…that makes me so warm and fuzzy inside. I love it!
May 27th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
I blogged about this too. My family has a long and distinguished history in the military. Every Memorial Day, my father would hang the flag out front and talk about his father who was career military. He rarely talked about his own experience in Korea.
I miss him a lot on these holidays.
May 28th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Army Guy and I both come from military backgrounds. Nice post, Ericka, and welcome to TNG!