PS

Just so you don't think that I'm totally unaware of the reason for the holiday, I just don't care for this, 'let's move Memorial Day' and every other holiday to Monday and we'll have more time off. Memorial Day (or Decoration Day as it's still often called here) is the 30th. That's Friday. That's like saying, 'gee, we'll celebrate September 11th (celebrate?) on the nearest Monday, and oh, by the way, how about a cookout?' See what I mean? Okay, that may be harsh, but a lot of folks out there agree with me. And it's not like all the 'national' holidays are like that. Look at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Actually, I've never understood why Christmas is a national holiday, given the whole separation of church and state thing, but that's a tangent for another time. I once came across a website (but can't seem to find it now) where they were calling for a return of Memorial Day observance to the traditional date, precisely because putting it into a long weekend encourages us to goof off and kick off the summer with barbeques rather than to remember the lives lost in war.

I'm going home to Danville next weekend, and we'll probably decorate and visit the graves then. If I can, I plan to take a recording of "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes with me. It was the only thing my grandfather requested for his funeral, and my mom and grandmother told the funeral parlour that, but they played it on some sort of bell chime thing. Not bagpipes. You can't fool Scots. :) I wish I knew where to track a girl I used to know named Cammie down. She's the only person I know who plays the pipes, and I don't even know her last name. Bill, if you read this, do you have any ideas? Or if any of you see a girl playing the bagpipes with a black Labrador companion animal in tow, send me an e-mail. :)

I wish I could get up to Owenton and take care of the graves there. Another good reason to get a reliable car. My cousins are the only other ones in the area, and I don't know if they're keeping the gravesite up. It was always my grandmother's job until she died--she passed it on to me. It's a tradition here for a daughter, usually the oldest of the survivors, to keep the graves up. I promised Nana I would, but with my transportation woes, I haven't been able to do it. My great-grandparents, Joe and Carmen Duncan, and two of their children are buried there--my great-uncle Joedy and my grandmother, Frances. If anyone in Owenton reads this, would you mind stopping by a checking on them for me. I'll light a candle for them instead.

We've always celebrated the holiday by tending all graves, not just the war dead or veterans. But everyone of my grandparents who are entombed now were veterans; even Nana was an army nurse. But tending all the graves means I've been to some of the smaller cemeterys like the Reardon plot outside Mitchellsburg, etc. It's on a hill way up at a steep angle. I'm not sure my grandmother can get up that one, but my mom and I might stop by.

In the meantime, we get off Monday from work automatically, and there's no sense in me being there with no one else there. So I'll be gaming, etc. tomorrow and visiting the graves at the end of the week.