Double Memorial

Some of us remember that this year the national holiday falls on the real Memorial Day, May 30.

But the double I'm thinking of is at Camp Nelson, the veteran's cemetery nestled in the rolling hills half an hour south of Lexington. There Mom and Dad lie together. A hero's grave.

I commute now through Arlington Cemetery, and I look up from my newspaper when we briefly come above ground there. I see the orderly stones, the tidiness of death at a military burial ground.

Life is so messy — but life is what we remember. And the least tidy lives we remember most. The passions and the excesses and the outbursts and the love. These can never be contained in measured plots and structured rows. 

And on this double Memorial Day I'm feeling doubly this way.