Notes from my Knapsack 5-16-24

Notes from my Knapsack 5-16-24
Jeff Gill

Memorial Day is a time for everyone
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For almost 160 years, Granville has come together as a community at Maple Grove Cemetery to remember.

We have many occasions for memory: the Fourth of July takes us back nearly 250 years to remember our national roots, and Christmas season has a number of events recalling us to our own history, long or short, from childhood to more recent celebrations, as well as a birth two thousand years ago.

Commencements are a time of remembering a student's arc through school, and often those attending or even presiding recall their own graduations. We have those in this month, too.

What I think is a powerful act of communal memory, though, is our tradition of gathering at Maple Grove at 11 am on Memorial Day. It is May 27 this year, the Monday holiday we've made it, with a procession from Broadway and Main at our village core, on to the east then down Pearl St. to what was once named "Solemn Street" and into the cemetery.

For some, this is the only time they visit this place; others of us have been there many times, laying to rest what we call "earthly remains" and trusting to heavenly hopes for a greater part of those we love.

Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day, is a time of remembering those who died while serving others, rooted in the losses of the Civil War from which our specific tradition begins. It picked up a pattern of getting long-untended graves "decorated" or tended; I have many memories of traveling around the rural roads of Illinois with my mother and grandmother, a flat or two of geraniums in the trunk of the car, planting them at family markers after pulling weeds and the grass grown long close to the stone.

My father was very intent on honoring Memorial Day itself; he was not a fan of the Monday holiday bill that moved a number of federal observances to the end of what are now "holiday weekends," but he reconciled himself to it over the years as a pragmatic solution. In our community, where I grew up, Memorial Day had largely lapsed as a civic event, and he was a leader in bringing it back as a public occasion, with solemn ceremony and patriotic salutes.

As a lover of Civil War history, and a re-enactor himself with the full uniform and Springfield muzzleloader, he had most of General Order Number 11 committed to memory, especially Gen. John Logan's lines about how "If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remains in us."

That commission, given the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868, was one my father felt strongly about fulfilling; it is a sacred trust of sorts that Granville has honored through the years. We will be one link in that chain for 2024. I am honored to be your speaker this year, as we gather, and remember.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he remembers many things each Memorial Day. Tell him what the occasion reminds you of at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.