Traditions

Growing up, our family holiday traditions always revolved around another, somewhat less glamorous event, the loading up into the family vehicle much as you would herd cattle into a pen.

Being a typical middle-class family from the Midwest, we traveled around the state to see family on Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving, often driving many hours without batting an eye. It became a family joke when, one Easter, we children piled into our maroon 1993 Astro Minivan after morning mass with the intent to travel across the state to my aunt and uncle's house, only for my sister to suddenly perk up from her enthralling book after an hour on the road to question, "Wait, where are we going?" All she knew was that we were traveling on a holiday like we always do. The destination was unimportant until we arrived.

One late May afternoon when I was around 12, my father called everyone outside. My brother, sister, and I spent much of our youth on the not-so-mean streets of our subdivision playing kickball, community hide-and-seek, and other childhood favorites, but this particular day we were inside, engrossed in finishing our homework and projects for the end of the school year. We eventually made our way to the garage where my dad was waiting, along with my mom, to load up into the minivan. 

With very little or no discussion, we all jumped in and took off down the road. I remember listening to the Tigers on the radio while we bumped along the side roads outside of Flint thinking to myself, "Wait, where are we going?" Not wanting to sound like my younger sister, this question went unspoken.

Only as we entered a particular stretch of road did our destination, and then the exact date, dawn on me. After a 25-minute drive, we turned the corner near a local school and onto a dirt road that could not have been more than a few hundred yards long before it dead-ended at a fence overgrown with bushes and tall grass. Just to the left of the dead end was a metal gate that looked like a swing arm you might see at a railroad crossing. Less a gate and more a horizontal pole just low enough to keep out cars and other vehicles and just high enough to tempt children and unruly teens to attempt an Olympic-style hurdle. 

We came to a stop at the dead end and piled out, each of us knowing we had a job to do. I went to the back of the van and opened the tailgate to unload the hedge trimmers, weed whackers, pruning shears, trowels, and shovels. My siblings and I carried the tools to the metal gate which my father had unlatched and entered the grounds.

The cemetery was shaped like a rectangle approximately 50 yards deep and three times as long. A little more than two-thirds of the grounds were covered with headstones and family plots. It was fenced in all the way around with the back butting up to ancient but still in use train tracks. I remember always wanting a train to go by whenever we visited so I could stand along the fence and watch zoom past from just a few feet away. A thought that now, as a middle-aged man, makes me nervous that a rock or some other object would magically shoot out from underneath the train directly into my eyes, rending me blind or possibly dead.

We went to work trimming bushes and edging gravestones and markers, digging out grass that had grown over the top of name markers that lay flat or sunken into the ground due to the combined weight of the stone and metal. With the five of us gardening and pruning around the gravesites, the clean-up only lasted an hour.

As we loaded tools back into the van, my mom appeared around the front bumper with baskets of flowers. We each grabbed a basket and traveled back through the open gate toward the center of the cemetery, a little way past a garden shed which was flanked by two large wide branched pine trees. Just past the center of the grounds, we stopped at two consecutive graves, one marked Earl Rose, the other to the right, David Rose. We placed flowers on either side of the simple metal markers, then meandered around other similar gravesites to another pair of markers a few hundred feet away whose names read, Linda Rose and Karen Rose. We placed the remaining flower baskets around the nameplates.

After we finished, we stood together around the resting places of my grandfather, uncle, and aunts while we reminisced about family, laughing together as my father told us about childhood moments of humiliation or joy. 

It's funny. I don't remember the stories my dad told us, but I do remember how his face looked and how, when he told us something he thought was exceptionally funny, he'd laugh so hard that he would tear up and start to cough from the effort. Those are really good memories.

We wrapped up our work and family time that Memorial Day by saying a prayer; nothing extravagant or inspirational, a simple thank you and I love you to my uncle, who died in Vietnam as a kid barely out of his teens, and to my other family members who all passed away over the previous 20 years. As I look back on those trips to the cemetery to clean and tend the gravesites on that little plot of land at the end of that dead-end dirt road, I am grateful for taking the time to remember our family, spend time together, and do the simplest, smallest of services for those who came before us.

Happy Memorial Day.