Straight From The Hart

My column in Lebanon newspaper 10/12/16 I opened my Wall Street Journal Monday and turned directly to the Opinion page as I always do, and the headline “Straight Talk About Christopher Columbus” by David Tucker immediately caught my eye.  My mind went back to the 1980s when I wrote for the Springfield News-Leader and I wrote a column about Columbus Day.   It was a rather innocuous essay, as I remember, recounting my memories of stories our school teachers would tell us on Columbus Day, and how we would color pictures of the ships sailing out on the ocean or make our own ships out of construction paper.  And then we would recite the poem “In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue”.  But it seemed to provoke the ire of another columnist at the newspaper and she took after me in a column of her own.  That was the first time I realized that Columbus Day could be  controversial. That is, until this year.  Seeing Tucker’s column...

Monday will be Memorial Day.  The mere mention  of the holiday generates swirls of memories in my mind.  Our observance of the day has probably undergone more changes in the seven decades I have lived than any other holiday we have throughout the year.  Tradition tells us it started as a way to honor the Civil War dead, but soon included all military graves, and now we decorate the graves of friends and family, too. Graves have been replaced by urns containing  ashes, and today many people have memorial services instead of funerals.  I’m not making a judgment with regard to that, just recognizing that once again things that were familiar to me so long ago are becoming more rare today,  like the fact that it is mostly the older generation who now decorates the graves. My Grandma Dame always called it Decoration Day.  That was back when we observed it on May 30, regardless of what day  of the week it fell on.   I  disli...