Sunday, May 27, 2007

The poignency of Memorial Day...



On my days off, I often go to Starbucks in the morning. The nearest Starbucks is currently directly across the street from the Golden Gate National Cemetary.

Since I've had a lot of "it's 10pm and I haven't taken any pictures yet" days lately, with the cemetary decorated for tomorrow's festivities, I decided to swing by and take some pics early for a change.

I took about 20 shots, with lots of angular shots of the headstones in neat rows, with thousands of flags. This one caught my eye.

Each stone had a flag lovingly set about a foot in front of it. As I looked down one row of stones, I saw this flag fallen, and went up to put it back. It seemed important to capture the image before I righted the flag, because it spoke to me about loss, sadness, and the randomness of death. The fact that the stone was for an wife and infant daughter of the soldier buried next to them didn't help. I honestly can't say that I've ever seen a "dash" listed the way that it was for the daughter (Oct 25-29, 1965).

I'll put the other pics up on the flickr page.

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