What's in a name?

A thought for Memorial Day

“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable,” - W.H. Auden

“Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.” - Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

For a long time, I associated Memorial Day with the beginnings of things. At first, this meant the beginning of summer. Then it meant the beginning of my first job out of college when, as a newly-hired reporter for the Gloucester Daily Times, my assignment was to cover the Memorial Day parade in Rockport, Massachusetts.

At 21, with a three-year-old in tow, I was in a state of mild panic. I took pictures of the men and some women marching in uniforms from their war — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. I watched the older, frailer ones ride by slowly, stiff-necked in their uniforms. I followed the parade respectfully but also frantic — where was the story here? What was I supposed to focus on? I knew no one in this town, had no idea what was important to these solemn men and women. Everything I knew about war came from movies or school. No one in any recent generation of my family had died in a war. I know I was more worried about how to make my new camera work than I was about the substance of the event.

My son skipped to the music coming from the high school band or stood, transfixed, as fire engines rolled by, gleaming red, flashing lights, blaring sirens. Afterwards, the spectators thronged the beaches and the smell of fried clams, hamburgers, hot dogs, and backyard barbecues filled the air. I filed some photos, a small summary of what I saw and heard, a few quotes from various onlookers or participants and breathed a sigh of relief.

That, or some form of it, was Memorial Day for me for a long time even after I no longer needed to report on it.

Still, there were moments, when the reality of death on the battlefield pierced through the comfortable ignorance that insulated me. A few months after moving to Jefferson, NH, a fresh grave appeared in the cemetery we had to pass every day to get to our house. The name: Benjamin A. Kenison. We didn’t know him - we knew nobody yet - we only saw his name carved in large, stark letters you could see from a passing car. You couldn’t miss his stone or those letters. The Vietnam war that played out on television became much more real every time we saw that name. It became even more real when we learned that our little town was filled with Kenisons. He was a stranger only to us and every child on my school bus knew him; some were related to him. Still, I realize now the impact of simply seeing his name, a permanent reminder that he’d been a passenger on a school bus like the one I rode, a child in this town, then a man, then gone.

Later, a few days after the first Persian Gulf War launched, I was in Washington D.C. for work. I went to the Vietnam Memorial and was struck by the power of all those names. Just one name after another. Each one connected to a family, a town, a memory, a future full of possibilities never realized. One look at one panel was all it took for the fog of numbers and statistics reported over the years to dissolve, revealing the lives inside them, each of those lives represented by a single name.

And I remember the first time I went to Balboa Park on Memorial Day and sat outside the San Diego Veterans Museum as a rotating group of veterans and active-duty military read aloud the names of each San Diego person who have died in war. I joined the small crowd in folding chairs on the grass on a beautiful San Diego afternoon and felt the noise of the park and holiday crowds recede. For a few seconds, each person’s name fell into my ears like the first word of a story and the last. For those few seconds they were not strangers but fellow humans who left the towns they grew up in, families that may or may not have nurtured them, or schools they may have loved or hated. They may have been saints, they may have been sinners. They may have died without a chance to know who they really were. The sound of each name traversed the distance to which I’d grown accustomed, and touched me with a sense of profound loss.

At that moment my political leanings didn’t matter. My thoughts about the rightness, wrongness, or inevitability of war didn’t matter. I was part of it. I was another link in the chain of silence, complicity, and humanity that sent each of these people to war. I was a stranger and they were strangers but for a few seconds I felt our connection. It was unexpected, uncomfortable, but also sacred.

I invite you to help me make a small version of a memorial here on this page. Please feel free to share the name of someone you would like to have remembered on Monday — friend, a family member, or a total stranger whose name you’ve learned. If there is a memory or a story you’d like to share, please do. You can post in the comments below. In order to comment, you may be prompted to set up an account or to register with Substack. This only takes a few seconds and doesn’t require any more action from you; they do it to ensure the folks commenting are subscribers and not trolls. However, if it works better for you, you can always respond to this newsletter by email and I will transfer the names and information to the comments section for you.

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Giveaway Winner

The copy of Anne Tyler’s new book Redhead by The Side of The Road is going out to drawing-winner Becca Rowan, a subscriber and a fellow writer who lives in Michigan. Thank you to everyone who responded and don’t worry - more opportunities to win new books are coming soon. Meanwhile I can tell you that it is a very good read. I just finished my copy and I want to compare notes with someone!

Short Story Recommendations For the End of National Short Story Month

Two weeks in, I learned that May is National Short Story Month. With a little over a week to go, it is not too late so here goes:

Two for Memorial Day: You Know When The Men Have Gone by Siobhan Fallon and Redeployment by Phil Klay. Both of these collections use brilliant fiction to explore how our most recent wars play out from very different perspectives. Fallon takes the reader inside the world of the military spouse in stories that cut to the quick and, sometimes, right to the funny bone, but always to the heart. Klay’s collection won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. There are 12 stories, each told in a very distinct voice from a different perspective. He has said that this was important to him because no single character or experience can communicate the whole. I read his book grateful for the way his choice opened a window for me to understand better. The writing is beautiful.

A little freebie gift courtesy of Lithub: 25 Alice Munro Stories Can You Can Read Online Right Now. Keep this link handy, hit it when you want to spend a little time with the master of the short story or, if you’ve never read her, this is a great sampling of her work. It’s got some of her best including The Bear Came Over The Mountain, Queenie, and others.

And here is a fun list assembled in 2019 with at least one perspective on the Ten Best Short Story Collections of The Decade. I’ve read and loved four of the collections on the list - Dear Life by Alice Munro, Tenth of December by George Saunders, Redeployment by Phil Klay, and Get In Trouble by Kelly Link (loved loved loved). There are a bunch on this list I’m adding to my TBR list beginning with A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin.

I used to love listening to Selected Shorts and forgot it was out there. If you want to sit back and pretend you are in elementary school after recess and the teacher is reading a few pages of a great story while you recoup, here’s your spot. Actors read short stories that make you smile, laugh, cry, all the emotions.

That’s it for this week. Let me know how you are and what you are reading whether it is short or long. I’ll add the books to our list on Bookshop.org. If you’re prompted to add any of them to your collection, remember that every order from this list helps independent bookstores and can earn a little money over time that we can donate to literacy programs.

Stay well. Dive into a great read. Let’s talk.

Betsy

P.S. And here’s your moment of Zen…Nothing to do with Memorial Day but everything to do with staying sane. Sing along. It’s easy and you’ve probably been singing it all along anyway.

Photo Credits:

Vietnam memorial photo credit: By William D. Moss -

Shadow salute photo credit: By Richard M Everington