Memorial Day

Every year I look back fondly at all those years Matt lived through the insanity of the Clinton Canoe Rigatta, rowing his heavy canoe with a friend down the Susquahanna, me lumbering along throwing power bars and water into the boat at every stop, always pregnant, always trying to keep a couple of kids from leaping into the river to be drowned. When you're in the middle of it, you hate it a lot, but then afterwards you think it was so beautiful and restful. The common human trick of making life better than it really is by wrongly remembering everything.

Memorial Day is always a good moment to freak out. OH NO! June is here! There are so many things happening in June! Oh No! Oh no! Oh no!

It doesn't help that I have a head cold and I can't distinguish in my own mind between the terrible problem of the children back talking me (how did I let this happen?) and the great pile of summer clothes mixed with winter sweaters sitting down in the basement mocking me as I sit up here trying to forget. Nor can those be disentangled from needing to paint the parish hall and finally test the kids and finally nail down the dates of Solemn Communion and set up music and preaching for while we're gone in July and do my school plan for the government for next year and turn in my reports for this year and clean off my desk and try to breathe…

Matt is extremely annoyed with me, sitting there, calmly memorizing his Greek words. I hate his constant and enthusiastic study of Greek for two reasons. One (to copy Alouicious who numbers everything) I am jealous that he is thinking about real things and becoming smarter while I spin into shallower and shallower idiocy. Two, I wish he loved me as much as he loves Greek. I mean, I know he does, but yeah, whatever. He always has time for Greek now, the way I always have time to be angry about dirt on the kitchen floor. That is the meaning of marriage.

So he's going to go work out and think about Greek, and I'm going to clean the house and go buy summer food. And then sometime today we will collapse outside and try to tell the children about why the whole country has this day off. And maybe I'll try to buy a flag. And while I draw breath ponder in thankfulness that because of the sacrifice of so many, we can indulge in so many dysfunction and functional activities, and study whatever we want, and eat whatever we want, and, most importantly, think and say whatever we want. All these are a great gift and one that I worry every moment we squander. So a good measure of thanksgiving is a good idea, pressed down and shaken together.

May God bless this country and save it, and may he gather the sorrows of those in the sea of loss, and may he protect those in harm's way, and may he deliver us out of he hand of all our enemies, and may he cause us to honor the brave, and may he give us courage to keep the freedoms we have so far enjoyed.