On Memorial Day I spent the morning working in my office. Before returning home for lunch, I stopped to visit the grave of my son. Mount Olivet cemetery was beautiful with American flags marking the graves of the veterans. It brought to mind these lines from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town:
“Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves…New Hampshire boys… had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends – the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”