Still, I always think of my dad, Hal Lockwood, on Memorial Day — but for a different reason than you might think.
He’s the spry lookin’ fella in the photo on the left. And while he is very much still alive (and ornery as ever), his best friend Jack was killed in Vietnam. Jack was my dad’s best friend (he’s not the other guy in the photo, that’s another friend of his).
But Jack’s death is probably the reason I am even here at all.
After Jack died my dad wanted to re-enlist and my parents had only been married a few years. I wasn’t even born yet.
Well, he was getting ready to ship out and my mom told my dad that she had a bad feeling about him leaving and told him that if he wanted to honor Jack’s memory then perhaps he should volunteer for the fire department. I was born about a year later…
So who do you remember on Memorial Day?