What an Odd Way to Start the Summer

I don't have anyplace to schlep my camera on Monday and I don't like it.

Obviously, I don't like not having an assignment. Or two. Sometimes I have two Memorial Day assignments because some towns have early services and some later. 

For that reason, I have become something of an expert on Memorial Day services.

The best is always the service by Musconetcong Post 278 at the park in Netcong.  I'm not sure why that is. A combination of things, I guess. 

There is something in the air around that service. 

Carl Beale from the legion post has been running it for years with his small band of dedicated veterans. It a lot of ways it is a typical small town Memorial Day service. There's a parade with fire trucks and ambulances and scout troops and Little League teams. A couple of schools have marching bands playing the songs of the military service branches and patriotic songs. The towns' mayors ride in a truck and other officials walk through the streets of  Stanhope and Netcong.

A trailer is set up in the park as a stage, right next to Lake Musconetcong. Dignitaries make their  speeches. The Presbyterian minister reads off the list of names of the people from Netcong and Stanhope and Budd Lake who gave their lives in all the wars. He reads them alphabetically by war and when he gets to Vietnam, I start to get weepy and when he gets to Henry Pierce, who was a medic who dated a high school friend of mine, I get more weepy. 

So, maybe that's why I think that is the best of all service. Of course, all of the names are personal to somebody. 

Part of the ceremony involves laying a wreath in Lake Musconetcong with a couple of people in a row boat to fish it out.

And of course, there is a mandatory playing of Taps. That hasn't always gone smoothly. Apparently, not every high school thinks they can require a trumpet player to attend the ceremony. One year, in Jefferson Township, the bugler said that school district most certainly does. They even have two buglers at some ceremonies. 

A friend of mine does the sound for the ceremony. He's a Vietnam vet, too. It's good to get together.

Memorial Day is important and I'm glad to see various places having virtual ceremonies or drive-by or whatever in this highly weird year. We need to remember the fallen from all these wars. 

We also need to stop saying "Happy Memorial Day," or treating it as if is is just another Monday Holiday. It's not. It's a day of remembrance. It's also a day to pray there are no more wars. No more war dead.

Yes, because of our climate here in New Jersey, it is the unofficial beginning of the summer season, but that doesn't change the solemnity of the occasion.