My feelings, exactly!
Decoration Day has always been full of irony to me, but even more so since my own daddy passed away. For six years, we were unable to even get a measly flag placed over his grave, mainly because of the fact that the various service organizations that have traditionally performed that task don't seem to have the "able" membership they once did (or so that's what we were told) and also, because it took my family quite a while to get a headstone up for him, so the VFW claimed they couldn't find his grave (even tho specific and very clear directions were sent with the request each year). That minor slight was a really big heartbreak for my old mother, who has faithfully tended and "decorated" all of her kin's graves, for damn near a century, planting virtual flower beds on them, weeding, painting, and making sure that our ancestors were looking nice and respectable for the memorial celebrations at the cemetery. Then, the year that we finally managed to get that tombstone in, I again contacted the American Legion, VFW, even the damn Boy Scouts, just to make double sure she would get to see his country's flag waving over him. Even with his brand new vet's plaque shining on the granite in all its glory, somehow, my father who served three long yr. in WWII and helped to build the Burma Road, was once again skipped and forgotten to be included in that simple honoring of a veteran's service.
When my daddy was alive, many a year he would stick his own flag out on the front porch, into the brackets he'd installed to support the flag pole. With one striking difference to all the other flags that our neighbors down the road put out...his would often be flying upside down, depending on his mood or the political climate of the day, a silent statement by one forgotten soldier. The day of his funeral, I got one of those little bitty dime store flags and re-stapled it to its stick and let my mother plant his upside-down symbol in amongst the funerary flowers we left behind for him. And I do think that's the flag he would have actually appreciated.
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