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Memories of You

Editor's note: For our Memorial Day service on May 25, 2003, one of our members played an offertory on the piano. He wrote this accompanying note for that morning's church bulletin.

I don’t often think of my great-uncle LaRue, because I never met him. I never laughed with him, shook his hand, or played ball with him. And although he would already have been a grandfather when I was a little boy, I never felt the warmth of his hug or the scratch of his whiskers, or heard him chuckle over memories of his own boyhood on a farm in Ohio.

But I do think of Uncle LaRue every year at this time, when I am newly amazed at the smell of lilacs and the bubbling of the wren, and when I realize how many joys I have that I can’t share with him or anyone else from that far-off yesterday.

Uncle LaRue left the farm at age 18 to fight with the doughboys in France. After braving the bayonet and the howitzer, he died in the flu epidemic that felled millions at the close of the Great War. LaRue’s mother kept his burial flag in a cedar chest until her death in 1937.

I think of Aunt Madeline more often. When I was seven, I innocently touched a whirling lawnmower blade and shortened my right index finger by half an inch. For therapy, Aunt Madeline recommended piano lessons. “Not just for the exercise,” she whispered. “You must also prove that nothing can defeat you.” She joined the Peace Corps during her late fifties and worked tirelessly for charities until her mid eighties, when she died quietly in her sleep.

I thought of Eubie Blake every day as I practiced the piece I am playing now. Eubie’s mother, a former slave, spent six years buying her son a piano, at 25 cents a week. Eubie went on to become the last living link to the Ragtime Era and to compose what you are hearing this morning. (He was famous for his sense of humor. On his 90th birthday he told reporters, “If I’d known I was gonna live this long, I’d’ve taken better care of myself.”) Eubie died in 1983 at age 100.

None of these people was perfect. (As a teen-ager, Eubie mortified his mother by accepting a job as a pianist in a brothel.) But much of what they did in their lives was inspired by pure love -- love of country, love of family, love of music, love of God. And thanks to all of those kinds of love, on this, my 53rd Memorial Day, I am sitting here enjoying the blessings of liberty and playing (with one too-short finger) Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You” on a piano decorated with Uncle LaRue’s flag.

-- Terry Dunkle