Memorial Day pilgrimage
...and the woman who "got" me
Now, I’m no film critic, but can we please talk about the box office hit that dropped in theaters on the Memorial Day weekend of 2001 and became the 6th highest grossing movie of the year? The movie in question is Pearl Harbor,1 and every early Millennial worth their salt will remember its hit song, “There You’ll Be,” by our girl, Faith Hill.
Before going further, though, you should know real fast that every year of my growing up, our family made a Memorial Day trek from Bozeman to Sheridan, Montana, often caravanning with my uncle’s family and our grandparents. Our two-hour pilgrimage was to the graves of my great-grandparents, and the adults in our party had the wisdom to build a visit to the Virginia City candy store into our itinerary. It’s amazing how much this particular stop helped build and maintain our adolescent interest in this annual tradition.
Other things that helped maintain annual momentum included a visit to Boot Hill where Henry Plumber and his vigilantes are buried, and a stop at the sporadically-open museum where Clubfoot George’s foot was morbidly on display. That is, until 2017 when his extended family had it removed and cremated. I can very much understand not wanting my ancestor’s limb to remain on display, especially when his guilt as a member of the feared Vigilantes was questionable.
Sometimes the music hall in neighboring Nevada City was open, and we’d stop to put dimes and quarters in the wheezing mechanical organs. Sometimes old technology is the coolest. We were often cold in and out of buildings. Trying to predict Montana weather in late May is like trying to predict how quickly AI changes everything.
The annual visit to the graves of Margaret and George has become more meaningful in my adult years, but even as a kid I thought there was something kind of cool about the tradition. Even though parts of the day felt really long. Case in point: My dad always brought along an armful of material about deceased family members, including my twinkly-eyed great-uncle Lloyd, who spent nearly 600 days in active combat during World War II. There were stories from family history, including Preston Thomas and his six missions to Texas for our church, and his sorrow when his beloved mule, Tex, died in a frozen storm. We talked about how Grandma Margaret and Grandpa George ended up married and moving to Montana after their spouses died young and tragically. Did I always appreciate these family history recollections? Sure didn’t. But am I deeply grateful for them now? Sure am.
After the cemetery, we’d go to the Sheridan city park and have a picnic, sometimes in cars or huddled in a baseball dugout in much need of sprucing up. On lucky good-weather years, we’d eat at the picnic table in the park. Table—singular. They have two by now, but it used to be just the one as I recall. After lunch, no matter the weather, we’d play a multigenerational family baseball game. If you were at all mobile, you played. During my teen years, these were impressively athletic games, but as my siblings and cousins have had kids and the oldest generation gets older, they have become more like a vague representation of the game of baseball.
After all this patriotic, enriching, sugary fun, we would drive home and productively prepare for our last week or two of school. It was Montana in the 1990s, and there we firmly believed in school not ending until mid-June.
One year though, some of us added a little something new to agenda. The year was 2001 to be exact, and my younger brother Parley and our cousins, Ben and Isaac, decided to go to a movie after the annual family day in Sheridan. BIG DAY.
I was home from my freshman year of college, and Par and Ben had just graduated high school. We were young, we were tan, we had a modest amount of money, and there was a new movie out. Like the absolutely cool kids that we were, we trotted ourselves down to the Ellen Theater early enough to get tickets for Pearl Harbor.
What I remember about the movie itself is not much, to be honest. Here’s what I do remember, though. Sitting in the balcony of the historic local theater, I was very moved by the movie, the patriotism, the romance (pretty sure there’s tragic romance involved), the Memorial Day in general. Also, for reasons known to women, my already naturally-tender emotions ran high.
I was sitting at the far end of the row and kept checking the boys for any sort of emotional reaction. None. I think they were enjoying the movie and were possibly inspired by the patriotism, but crying with tears streaming down their faces they were not.
At one point, I leaned forward and looked to the right to observe the rest of the row, eager I suppose to find literally anyone having an experience similar to mine. At that moment, an older woman at the opposite end of the row also leaned forward and looked to her left. As our swollen, teary eyes met, with the briefest of nods, we got each other. Across the row, across the generations, across all the unmoved people between us, she and I got each other. And there was something immensely cool about that.
But as memorable and poignant as that teary moment with a stranger was, it’s just one of the Memorial Day memories woven across the generations and over the years. Clubfoot George, that you can count on the candy store to be open every Memorial Day, baseball in the park, and knowing you belong to a place and a family. And that Dad will have a stack of papers helping us remember it all.
Isn’t life cool, and aren’t people interesting? See you in the next one…
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Including footnotes makes me feel fancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_(film)
Memorable Memorial days. I’m glad I could be taken down memory lane with your sharing. All the details brought back to life!