Memorial Day weekend is a time of ritual for many families, and that’s certainly true for mine which has dwindled down to a precious few – my sister and myself. My sister Donna, the perfect child, has made a point of visiting the graves of our relatives since my dad passed in 2003, bringing flowers and trimming the surrounding grass, and I’ve been accompanying her since I moved back to Minneapolis in 2007. Dad was a WWII veteran and both he and my mother are buried out at Fort Snelling National Cemetery. Donna’s husband Jim was a Marine who served two tours in Vietnam. He passed in 2014 and is also buried there. So, as I say, every Memorial Day weekend, we make the short pilgrimage to remember our loved ones and to pay respects to the other veterans. Donna and I always manage to focus on the good times and to keep our spirits as light as possible. Our grandmother and Jim’s parents are buried in Lakewood Cemetery by Lake Calhoun, and we visit them afterward. Donna lets me tell her the same old stories over and over, and so it’s always a good day

Before I go any further into my family history here, I wanted to give a shout out to the folks at Flags for Fort Snelling. I only heard about them recently, and don’t know their history, but this year their goal is to put a flag on every headstone at Fort Snelling Cemetery. They’ve reached their fundraising goal for this year, but even a small donation will help give them a good start on next year.

As I said, my dad was a veteran of World War II. He was a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re the folks who built the portable bridges, strung telephone lines, and made sure the roads were passable for the men and equipment that trekked across Europe and North Africa. When the war was over and my parents were married, dad joined the Army Reserves. This meant he had to go out to Fort Snelling every other Monday night for meetings, and he spent his two weeks of vacation time from work at either Camp Ripley up near Little Falls or at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. All of this entailed a good deal of “homework” for dad and his fellow officers. Throughout my entire childhood, our basement was filled with stacks of black 3-ring binders and beige-colored Army manuals, and our old kitchen table was laid out with maps that had multiple plastic and onion-skin overlays (with circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was…). My most vivid memory of these maps is the one of Saudi Arabia because of the distinctive shape of the Arabian peninsula and the fact that we were studying that region in World Geography around the same time. Dad would spend hours pouring over those materials, and he would often have other guys from his outfit over in the evenings and weekends spending hours huddled over them. The maps and the old kitchen table are long gone, but the stacks of manuals survived in our basement until long after dad retired from the Army Reserves. Anytime I wanted to do something in the basement, it usually meant having to rearrange those blasted books, maps and binders.

I moved to the Bay Area in California in 1983 and as the years passed, those books and maps faded from my consciousness. But then in 1991, President Bush the elder decided to send troops to the Middle East for the first Gulf War. As soon as I heard the news, I called my dad and told him, “They can’t invade Saudi Arabia! The plans are still in our basement!” Okay, it’s not that funny. But it tickled me and got a laugh from my dad, and I’ll always remember it.

I had another flashback to Dad’s work in the Reserves about ten years later during an episode of “The West Wing” that had a story line about a skirmish between hunters on the U.S./Canadian border. In that episode, Deputy National Security Adviser Kate Harper (portrayed by the lovely Mary McCormack) was flabbergasted when she learned that the Army had plans for invading Canada waiting on the shelf. Well folks, it’s fiction following fact again because (you guessed it), for several years my Dad and his cronies worked on just such a plan. Of course, the major difference was that the plans Dad was working on assumed that the Soviets had come over the North Pole. conquered Canada, and were on the verge of invading us, and they were setting up war games for a summer camp exercise.

I miss you, Pop, and I’ll always be proud of you!