Sitting here at the keyboard, reading stuff and just wasting daylight, heard on the TV there behind me a song by Willie Nelson...I suppose any other time that part of Willie's song would not have touched a nerve as much, as only a moment before switching channels, an excited sounding voice was raving on about how heavy the traffic would be this Memorial Day....so, the lower prices of gasoline has to do with bored Americans getting out on the roadways and byways of America to celebrate something... Will their big, high-powered vehicles be filled with potted plants and cut flowers, heading to some old graveyard to observe the 'set-aside' day of remembrance? Back in this 81 year life of my own, it was called Decoration Day...took a day off from the labor of that Iowa farm to go around to the local graveyards and decorate...sure, you may have gone to the county seats flower place and got some cut flowers, but chances were, there in your own garden or up along side of the house, were the lilac bushes and the iris flowers growing in springtime profusion...Later in the Elk Creek cemetery you look over the stones and monuments that mark the graves...some still fresh and hollowed out looking where the soil had settled...you know that later in the summer you'll take the team of horses and a wagon full of earth to fill in that sunken soil...and there are those grave markers made of limestone...once so long ago some relative had gouged a name on it's surface with dates, but the acid rains over the years had eroded the information, so now that lost name is like a lost soul in your mind... Here I am at 81 years old...only 1 other member of our large brood still alive and he, like I, will never travel that distance again to decorate the graves...there is a very large monument with the WILBORN name gouged on the granite surface... there by the river in Dundee Iowa...probably some 'hot-shot' monument salesman had talked my Grandfather, the old German farmer into that purchase by assuring him it was the 'American Way'...the Right-to-Passage business! My kin is scattered over a dozen cemeteries there in the Heartland...with hopes of mine that the perpetual care offered by most will keep those hallowed grounds how ever coming generations expect them to be....Willie sang about 'graveyards full of old black men'.....I'm sure that's what I heard...or imagined. Chief
WILLIE NELSON LYRICS - City Of New Orleans - A-Z Lyrics
www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/willienelson/cityofneworleans.html
Lyrics to "City Of New Orleans" song by WILLIE NELSON: Ridin' on the City of New Orleans Illinois Central Monday ... Passing trains that have no name and freight yards full of old black men. And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles
WILLIE NELSON LYRICS - City Of New Orleans - A-Z Lyrics
www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/willienelson/cityofneworleans.html
Lyrics to "City Of New Orleans" song by WILLIE NELSON: Ridin' on the City of New Orleans Illinois Central Monday ... Passing trains that have no name and freight yards full of old black men. And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles