A Day For Remembering

          Memorial Day memories:

          - R. E. C. McDougal, head of Orrville City Schools, speaking in the early 1960s to a small crowd at Crown Hill Cemetery.  Veterans in slightly tight uniforms and solemn faces, trying to remember the faces of buddies long gone.  Children playing hide-and-seek among the gravestones.

          - Years of covering the Indy 500.  Hunting offbeat photographs in Gasoline Alley, on pit road and in the infield near turn one.  Watching Tom Sneva flying a race car – inverted and burning – off turn two.  A sudden, midrace cloudburst so abrupt that I got a photo of three race cars at about 100mph in a wild spray of water, but one car was sliding backwards while passing two that were headed in the right direction.

          - A decade of annual trips to Lick Run, West Virginia, just north of Webster Springs.  There we camped on the front lawn of Jake Cutlip, the "Mayor" of Lick Run.  A true mountain man, Jake lived completely off the grid.  Access to his "place" meant a grinding half-hour drive to cover four miles, in part by driving down the Lick Run creek bed itself.  Riding dirt bikes to explore the trails Jake had blazed through the mountain forest.

          - Pondering the cost of this three-day weekend:  Rows of white stones stretching far, too far, across the neatly trimmed grass of Arlington National Cemetery.  "Taps" drifting across the waves of headstones, a sea of lives cut short, an ocean of Americans we didn't get to know well enough.

          - The words of Rodney King: "People, I just want to say, can we all get along?"

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