An Enigmatic Creation

The holiday that opens up the summer season is over.  Memorial Day is usually considered the start of summer activities.  Swimming pools open, graduations are over, many schools are out for the summer, and folks are planning vacations, trips, and get-togethers.  The weather is turning warmer and more summer-like.  Wheat in the grain belt is ripening and plants in the garden are flourishing in the warmth and rain.

Memorial Day, of course, is more than the herald of summer.  It has become a three-day holiday of boating, picnics, and travel, but also solidly remains a day of remembrance…of war and peace, sacrifice and duty.  A remembrance of family and friend, ancestor and contemporary.  We stop if even for a few moments in the peace of the cemetery and remember those who have gone before us.

For many of us, a visit to the cemetery once a year is an anticipated, yet tentative task.  At the cemetery where the Planks are mostly interred, we take a look around to see the newly dug sites and check to see whose body may be at rest there.  Most of the time we know who it is since we come from a small, rural area and the cemetery is a rural church cemetery.

Sometimes, we already knew of that person’s passing.  Sometimes, though, we are surprised to learn of the passing of an old friend or distant relative.  And sometimes we look at the newer, but not very recent grave sites and remember again the passing of someone we once knew about, but it had slipped our minds over the past year.

Those kinds of slips of the mind, I’m afraid, will become more and more common; not just regarding those who have died and gone before us.  But rather in many other ways, we will one time know something, then a year or more later “learn” of it again.  We will then remember back to when we first heard of it and criticize ourselves for forgetting.

And then, as if the holiday weekend had a split personality, we get together with family and friends.  We barbeque.  We go boating and camping.  We fish and hike and eat and visit.  We enjoy the company of others.  We reminisce and catch up.  We travel.  The whole three day weekend seems busier and more filled with events and “stuff” to do than any normal work day or week.

And so it goes (to borrow a phrase).  I have to wonder what someone who might come from another galaxy, and who watches what we do here on earth might have to say about how we do things.  Nevertheless, the way we do things IS the way we do things.  And if we really didn’t like it, we’d change, I suppose.  So here’s to the human body, soul and spirit, created by God and endowed with amazing capabilities of thought, reason, and emotion.  We are indeed an enigmatic creation, but in many ways wouldn’t have it any other way.