Memorial Day.

My schedule and my flitting attention span prevented me from noting the following while it was still Memorial Day, but hey.

Last year my Uncle Smitty gave me a canteen/mess cup dated 1918. He knows I'm a student, so to speak, of the Great War, and knew that a gift like the mess cup wouldn't be lost on me. It most certainly wasn't, because I use it on almost a daily basis for consuming just about anything but coffee, because hot liquid + aluminum = burnt lips.

It's not using the cup that makes it meaningful, however. It's the very history of the thing, which is almost a hundred years old now, and the story it might tell. Was it ever issued to a doughboy unlucky enough to be sent to St. Mihiel or the Argonne Forest? If it was, what kind of hell did that fellow go through, and how often was he lucky enough to have something hot ladled into his canteen cup? Was he doomed to be planted in foreign soil, or to come home to a parade and maybe later march with the Bonus Army, where he'd be shot or beaten by his own countrymen? My particular cup is reasonably battered, but that may have less to do with its use during WWI than the fact that it's probably been through dozens of hands before it reached mine. What would its original user think of someone like me picking it up every day and filling it with yogurt or okra and peppers or soymilk? Whatever happened to the factory workers who created the cup? How did the soldier or Marine or line worker who handled this cup spend their last days? What did they think of the War to End All Wars? Of the barbed wire, the rolling barrages, the French widows, the German conscripts in oversized feldgrau uniforms, the American isolationists, Woodrow Wilson, Prohibition, the League of Nations, the vengeance of Versailles?

Just like last Armistice/Veterans' Day, I'm opting not to politicize this "holiday," but rather take a moment and think about those who came before me. I recommend y'all do the same, and do so with open hearts and critical minds. You might not have a scuffed canteen cup to ruminate upon, but you don't need one. You've got America and its soldiery, past and present, and everything that came at the points of their bayonets- for good or ill- and that's more than enough.

Here's to my pops, my uncle, my granddad, my great-uncle, and my friend Richard Patton. Two of 'em are dead, and one of those I never met, but all of their stories, in one fragmented way or another, are ones I hope to tell sooner or later... not to make any point other than that humans are fucked-up, good-hearted, unbelievably resilient yet fragile, and utterly unique creatures.

Let's hope I never have to add another veteran to this list, but if I do, here's to hoping they turn out to be people as admirable as the veterans I already know.