I just turned 58 earlier this month, so this month makes me a little nostalgic about my childhood, which spanned the 1970s.

May was my birthday, but it was also carnival/fundraiser for the local hospital, the Hospital Fete, which I unabashedly loved. There was this giant pancake breakfast for the Tall Ceders that my family and neighbors went to together. And then, of course, there was Memorial Day.

My father was a Normandy vet, so Memorial Day was a combination of the actual meaning of the holiday and the very American cultural side of the holiday, which, of course, involved grilled meat. The day started with a trip to the cemetery near our house for a Memorial Day ceremony. The gun salute is still embedded in my mind, and so is my father’s face during the ceremony. He saw a lot in the war, and while my father seemed to treat going to the ceremony as something like a duty, I could tell it affected him.

After that emotional moment, it was off to Hills Department store, where a local charity set up this stand outside that had these super cheap grilled hot dogs, something like 20 cents for one and a coke. It was crazy cheap, but my mother said that they raised money based on the donation jar, which my mother always threw a few dollars into. I loved those hot dogs for some reason, I looked forward to them during the entire trip to Hills. The things that children enjoy…

Then that evening we would host a backyard barbeque at our house for my aunt, uncle, and grandma. My mom made incredible grilled pork chops and several incredible sides. After eating, we would talk, and I would play and listen to conversations. I remembered my grandmother talking about her cousins coming back from naval service in the Pacific theater. All three of them saw heavy action on ships. Despite this, my grandmother talked about it as if they went off to summer camp, and I realized later in life that these were likely happy stories told to my sweet grandmother so as not to upset her.

But in any event, they were remembered as veterans. And at Memorial Day cookouts, after he stopped drinking, my father would talk about his war experiences. It was where the two sides of Memorial Day met for me, on those warm late May evenings in a backyard in York, Pa.

The last word goes to Johnny Cash.