Little Red Blooms

I saw them when I got out of the car at Wal-Mart.  Their blue vests and hats marked them as did their gesture of trying to hand something to the people passing by.  I could see the little flickering of red in their hands.  I felt something inside me tighten up, and I reached for my wallet, gritted my teeth.  It was Memorial Day, and the Buddy Poppies were out again.

As you can see from the picture, I do not object to the Buddy Poppies.  I buy at least one every year.  Whenever I see the American Legion or the DAV handing them out, I always contribute.  The thing that made that little spring inside my clockwork heart wind tighter was what these tiny red blossoms mean to me.

Almost every male member of my family has served in the military.  Both my grandfathers were WWII veterans, one almost freezing to death in Italy while the other went all over the place loading bombs onto planes.  My dad was sent to Vietnam while he was in the Coast Guard. My uncles were Vietnam-era Marines; one of them also served in the Coast Guard after his tour with the Corps ended.

It has been just a little less than a year since I lost the uncle who served in both branches, my Uncle Gary.  He spent the last years of his life in a veterans' care facility in Kosciusko after having a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed on one side.  For whatever reason, even though there are so many veterans in my life, those little red flowers always make me think of him.

I miss him.  Even though at the end, his condition and his medication kept him from being mentally sharp, I miss going to see him and talking with him.  Today, seeing those little flowers again brought the end of it back, the long hours in the hospital waiting room, the last time I saw him.

I believe in donating to the men who hand the poppies out.  They are men who served our country and who continue to serve it still by making sure our veterans are taken care of.  They are men like my grandfathers, like my dad, like my uncle, like my friends, like my students, like all those men and women who have left behind comfort and safety to do what was needed.  Their sacrifices deserve to be remembered, whether those sacrifices were physical on the field of combat or those much-harder-to-spot renderings of psychological health, family closeness, peaceful dreams at night.  I cannot do much about most of these things.  I can, however, do this one little thing, show my respect in this one way.  Maybe it means something.