Wednesday was Flag Day, my mother's favorite holiday.
When I was a little kid I once asked my mother what her favorite holiday was.
As she enumerated each one to me, in her special way, they came alive with stories of heroism and pride.
But Flag Day was special to her.
"All our ancestors from the Revolution until now fought for our flag," she told me, "and many died for it. It's the most beautiful flag in the world."
I lived in a family of veterans, on a street populated by soldiers, sailors and Marines, where the American flag was revered above all else.
It was never allowed to touch the ground, it was always hung properly, and it was always put up in the day light hours and retrieved at dusk.
Old flags were never even destroyed. They were kept in the old man's closet in special cases.
Every Memorial Day we would troop off to the cemeteries to cut the grass and put out the geraniums on the old boy's graves, the veterans, of those wars of long ago. And the old man always carried a few extra flags to plant in case the cemetery had not yet put them out.
I once questioned, in my youth, the letters GAR and AEF on the medallions which held the small flags on two of the graves.
The old man explained all about the Grand Army of the Republic and the American Expeditionary Force, about Lincoln and Grant and about John J. Pershing.
Then he talked about my great uncle, Earle Burtis, who had been artilleryman in the 42nd Rainbow Division in WW I, and how he had to put the gas masks on the horses before he could put one on himself and that he bad been gassed. But later, he had been visited by General MacArthur in the hospital. He would suffer many years before dying in the early 1920s from the effects of the phosgene the Germans mailed him in a barrage.
But a small American flag always graced his AEF standard in Spring Forest cemetery in Binghamton, NY.
Today, the last flag that flew there on my final Memorial Day is affixed to the front of my house in New Hampshire.
When I think of our flag I think of my old man in the Navy and my mother in the Army Air Corps during World War II.
I see our flag on fire engines, the coffins of our dead, on passing cars, on aircraft, on Mt. Suribachi, on my old man's ship, in their rows at Arlington, on the stoops in Brooklyn, in books, in paintings, and at Little America.
And when I see our flag I think of my mother, of bloody footprints in the snow, George Washington, Appomattox, San Juan Hill, Chateau-Thierry, Pearl Harbor, Chosin Reservoir, Hue City, and Baghdad.
The stars remind me of those who died and the red, their blood, the white, their unblemished courage, and I recall the wars where my ancestors gave their all so that we can live our lives today under this beautiful flag - The American Revolution, the War of 1812, The Black Hawk War, The Civil War, where we died on both sides, World War I and World War II.
And I always return to my mother and her quiet beauty and her love of country, and because she left the safety of a scarce teaching position to serve in the military at a time when few women did.
Her honorable discharge rests in a dresser drawer next to another ancient flag with 48 stars - the first small flag she gave me.
These are two fitting gifts from a woman who taught her son that there is no higher love than that of country and no prettier flag than ours.
I miss my mother every day and I am reminded of her every time I see an American Flag.
And I can think of no better connection to awaken memories.
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