Editorials

It happens every Memorial Day.
Camera in hand, I go to the ceremony at the Healing Field bound and determined not to get misty eyed during the service.
After all, I’m a working, impartial journalist there to report and photograph, not participate.
Then someone says or does something that gets me going, my throat gets a lump and I have to pretend I have a speck of dirt in my eye.
This year was no different. I was fine for a while, snapping photos of praying and saluting veterans and their families while trying not to detract from the ceremony.

They don’t hold hands, swaying back and forth in an unbroken circle to summon ancient powers of parenthood.
Mothers hold other, tiny hands in the grocery store.
Mostly to keep those same hands from grabbing large, powdery bags of flour and dumping them on the floor.
They walk beside tricycles as plastic wheels rumble across pavement.
They wipe their own eyes watching the same tricyclist, now grown up, walk across the stage at graduation or down the aisle.

I love reading obituaries.
Not because I am happy to learn that someone died.
But because it’s an entire epic novel squeezed into miniature, tracing life from birth to death.
It’s Homer’s Odyssey compressed down to the time it takes to read a haiku.
Is this morbid fascination? I don’t think so.
For one instant, in a few, compact lines, we learn that someone’s ordinary life wasn’t so ordinary.
Read between the lines.
We have more in common with the dead than you’d think.

Good weather and large crowds mean last weekend’s truck and tractor pull will result in a hefty donation for the county park.
Just how hefty that donation will be is unanswerable, and not because receipts from the gate and concessions are still being counted.
And that’s a problem.
The Anderson County Fiscal Court needs to adopt a hard-and-fast policy on using the county park for events of any kind, including those designed to be fundraisers.