Childhood Memorial Day Memories

I remember Memorial Days from when I was in elementary school, in Lebanon Indiana.  School had just gotten out for the summer and so it was a day of celebration as well as remembering.  This was in the days before Monday holidays, so Memorial Day was May 30.  There was a parade with floats and bands, and maybe horses.  Those with family members buried in town went to the cemetery and cleaned up the grave site and put in flowers.  My family didn’t have any local graves to attend to, so that wasn’t part of our day.   I wish I had pictures from that time, more than my mind’s eye and memory.  My memory says that the weather was always warm and sunny, but of course that can’t have always been true.

The rest of the day would have been spent around the house and yard, playing with my siblings and neighborhood friends.  I might have gone for a bike ride.  My parents would have been doing some yard work, my father perhaps mowing the lawn.  The big event for my mother was the Indianapolis 500, a big car race held every Memorial Day (now Memorial Day weekend) at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a residential suburb of Indianapolis also called Speedway.   The race is 500 miles long or 200 laps of the track.  This race was broadcast on the radio in its entirety and my mother loved to listen to as much of it as she could.  She often would sit in the yard in a lawn chair, smoking and listening, and scoring every lap in a table printed in the newspaper.

There would be a picnic in the yard, sometimes cold fried chicken and always a big yellow bowl of potato salad and usually deviled eggs.  Or my father might have fired up the charcoal grill and cooked hotdogs and hamburgers, can of beer in one hand and cigarette in the other.  There would have been a chocolate sheet cake or maybe cookies or brownies for dessert.

The day would have ended pretty quietly, with the kids taking baths and maybe reading a little before bed.  Bedtimes came much too early in those days.  I remember having to go to bed before the sun was completely down in my younger days.