Keep Me In Your Heart For A While

Memorial Day has always been about memories. From the visits to Mountain View cemetery to the ten kilometer runs, I have a series of benchmarks that take me from my past to the present. I remember patiently waiting on those bright spring days for the release from my mother to leave the decoration of graves to go play with my brothers on the cannon located at the far end of cemetery. I remember my first Bolder Boulder race after knee surgery, when I was still hobbled but kept going by the cadence set by a group of Marines running just ahead of me.
And I thought of my father - the man who once wrote "scatter me here" in our cabin's guestbook, so we took him at his word. Consequently, there isn't a convenient graveside to decorate, though there is a plaque mounted to a boulder next to the creek, just behind the high school we all graduated from. That's okay, since proximity is not essential here. I carry these notions with me as I run, and put them together with other thoughts to create what you read here - a kind of "brain smoothie". What came out today was this: A recollection of the bumper sticker on our neighbor's station wagon. It had a peace symbol, and read "Footprint of the American Chicken." This was a family that came to our little cul-de-sac in Boulder, Colorado from the somewhat more conservative enclave of Kansas City, Missouri. During the 1970's, they existed as the right-wing element in an otherwise politely liberal landscape. They were the Fox News Channel in an NPR neighborhood. It was only today that it occurred to me how challenging that must have been for all concerned, but the image that came to me was one of my father, suggesting a "neighborhood salute." My father was always very much a uniter. He loved to bring people together, so until now, this only appeared to me as another way for my dad to bring the street along as an extension of his fun-club. The salute he was suggesting involved hanging his fingers down in a claw - the footprint of the American Chicken. Maybe I've got this wrong. Time does funny things to even the best memories, but I choose to remember my father's quiet bit of neighborhood resistance.