Memorial Day Weekend One

When I was in grammar school, we would have an outdoor celebration for Memorial Day. I can remember Flanders Fields and the boy next to me fainting in the hot afternoon sun. I never remember reading Whitman's great poem, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, but we could have. Imagine if you will fifty children standing in the sun beginning:

WHEN lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

The Civil War seemed so much closer then. I believe our older teachers must have known old Union veterans in their youth so it was a living thing to them. Let me work out the math using 1960 as the fulcrum date. If 2004 was to 1960 as 1960 was to 1916, then a Civil War veteran could have been in his late sixties then. Lincoln would have been in time like Eisenhower today.