ValueSpeak

A Weekly Column

By Joseph Walker

valuespeak@msn.com

MASON JAR LILACS

            Memorial Day is the surest, clearest evidence that I have become my father.

            Sort of.

            I don??™t poke at my potato chips to break them up into smaller pieces before I eat them like he did.  I can??™t make eating scrambled eggs crunch like he could.  I can??™t make a single glass of soda last through the day and all the way to bed time like he could.  And I??™m not as everlastingly nice to everyone as he was.

            But in almost every other respect I??™m pretty much him.

I snore.  I embarrass my children by singing too loud in church.  I tend to wander ??“ a little ??“ around the road while I??™m driving (the way I see it, the lane is 14-feet wide, and we??™re legally entitled to use all of it).  And lately when I??™m at a restaurant and the waitress asks if I??™m enjoying the meal, I just can??™t keep myself from responding: ???You??™re a good cook!???

Thankfully, I??™m not calling the waitress ???honey??? yet.  But at the rate I??™m going, that??™s probably only a few weeks away.

Oh, and I have a hard time remembering things ??“ which doesn??™t seem like that big of a deal to me.  I mean, I??™ve lived more than half of a century, and everyone knows the human brain is only good for about 49 and a half years worth of remembered stuff.  Physiological mathematics tells me that whenever I learn something new ??“ which is pretty much every hour of every day ??“ something old has to be forgotten in order to make room for it.  That??™s just common sense, isn??™t it?  But for some strange reason, my children seem to think that in the midst of all this learning and forgetting, I should at least be able to remember their names.

And I do.

Usually.

But it??™s the Memorial Day thing that makes me think that my father didn??™t really pass away last August ??“ he just dumped that 94-year-old body that was slowing him down and moved into this younger, larger, significantly less athletic body of mine.

Lock, stock and diabetes.

Take the lilacs, for example.  Every Memorial Day Dad would roam the neighborhood harvesting (with permission, of course) lilacs from bushes that were bursting with the fragrant flower.  Then we would haul the flowers to the family grave sites, where he would lovingly distribute them among the dearly departed ??“ usually in Mason jars filled with water.

Through the years I grew to hate those smelly flowers.  I hated how they smelled.  I hated how they looked.  I hated how they seemed to start wilting the second you clipped them from the bush.  And I hated how dorky it looked to stick a Mason jar filled with wilting lilacs on the grave of someone who ??“ I??™m just guessing here ??“ probably hated them as much as I did.

Still, we took them, Memorial Day after Memorial Day.  And the dreaded Mason jar lilacs became as much a part of our holiday tradition as Aunt Hazel??™s graveside smooches, Mom??™s cold picnic chicken and the stories about the cousins who died in The Big Flood.

The other day, however, my 13-year-old son found me standing by our back fence, where our neighbor??™s abundant lilac bushes spill over into our yard.  I tried to explain the reasons for my long-standing contempt for the flower, but I don??™t think Jonathan was buying any of it.  Something about the fragrance-induced smile on my face betrayed me.

???I don??™t think the neighbors will mind if you clip a few flowers to put on Grandpa??™s grave on Memorial Day,??? Jon suggested gently.

Now, if only I can find a few Mason jars . .

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