Forget the calendar. Forget astronomy. Forget Winter and Spring. Summer begins on Memorial Day. Parades. Pools. The Brickyard. Good things on grills. White shoes. Proms. Parties. Summer dresses. But it was not always so.

Many of our grandparents, whose parents remembered the Civil War, still called it "decoration day" from a time when the word meant ribbons in more than one sense of the word.

Many of our fathers taught us, without thinking about it the meaning of "on parade."

"Real men," be they six or seventy, doffed their hats or covered their hearts, or did both when the colors passed, whether carried by cub scouts or the last of the veterans of the great wars, doing their best to stay in step, matching the pace of vet most senior.

Some still remember.

In Middleburg veterans and the sons and daughters of veterans still mark the graves of every member of the armed forces whose grave can still be found, from the Revolution to Iraq and Pakistan, and beyond.

If one watches carefully one still sees, here and there in the now much smaller crowds along the parade routes, bent old men and distracted young boys with their hats in their hands from time to time.

Memorial Day is arguably one of the most distinctly American of holidays, different in the most fundamental and most American of ways from even the 4th of July or Thanksgiving.

It is a day we remember things those we honor would all too often rather forget.

It is a day of profound sorrow turned into a day of total joy and celebration.

Americans do that.

It would please those we honor.

It is, somehow, in the words of the most American of presidents, "altogether fitting and proper that we should do so."