Traverse City Record-Eagle

Loraine Anderson

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June 28, 2010

Loraine Anderson: Stories to treasure

By LORAINE ANDERSON Local columnist

Memories and images of my father return to me at the Northport Memorial Day service and have been with me ever since. I pay attention.

At first I thought it was the Northport ceremony that brought him to awareness and stirred memories of Memorial Days past.

Our high school band used to march single file into the cemetery to a haunting cadence tapped out by drummers on the rims of their drums. We played the "Star Spangled Banner," a Sousa march and an elegy. The service ended with prayers for peace and the plaintive notes of "Taps" echoing from a big spruce that hid the band's top cornet player.

Or perhaps the multitude of small American flags, fluttering like butterflies at veterans' graves, had something to do with it

My dad was a World War II vet who died a decade after the war in the mid-1950s at age 35. Every year the Veterans of Foreign Wars put a small American flag in the holder near the bronze military plaque on his grave. One year, I retrieved the faded flag at the end of summer and may still have it folded neatly between the pages of an early journal.

Memories and thought streams linger as I putter in my flower beds in the days between Memorial Day and Father's Day, a Sunday that always reminds me of my grandfather. He loved to garden and became my father figure after Daddy died too young.

I have always had a sense of them close by, watching over and guiding me. Their insistent presence this year surprises me and prompts me to carry a small notebook as I work on projects around the house. I have lived long enough to know this is important in some way I don't yet understand.

I call this writing "Summer Essay 2010," though it feels more like poetry.

I notice how emotional I feel as I write captions for old photographs submitted by vets or their families for "A Tribute to Our Troops," a book the Record-Eagle will publish this fall. I feel a kinship with them, their wives, daughters, sons, nieces, nephews and grandchildren who dug through old scrapbooks for pictures and sometimes found war-time letters and journals, some dating back to the Civil War.

Sometimes their voices crack when we talk, and sometimes mine.

I realize I am learning through their stories about my father and the world at war he lived in during his 20s. We never got to talk about those years because he died so young and I was just a little girl, and perhaps we never would have had he lived longer.

But stories are told and passed down in so many ways.

Loraine Anderson can be reached at 231-933-1468 or landerson@record-eagle.com.

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