Brrrmorial Day

The only other time I was cold on Memorial Day weekend was a visit to Montreal to see M back in our courtin' days.

We were at a great breakfast restaurant downtown that had open-air seating. It was a little too frosty for my blood and we had to close the adjacent windows.

My first New England Memorial Day weekend started with rain and temperatures in the 30s. If ever the acronym "WTF" was applicable, it was this weekend. Saturday was absolutely frigid. Northwest of here in upstate New York at a place called Whiteface Mountain, they had 34 inches of snow.

34. Inches. Of. Snow.

Now we're poised for another aberrant weather event late this week, when the weekend will start with highs near 90 on Thursday.

The biting cold and the upcoming roast are not normal. We're talking about a temperature swing of more than 50 degrees in the span of just a few days.

And somehow there are people who scoff at the idea of climate change. "Global warming," they chortle.

Yeah, I've got 90 degrees of your global warming on tap.

The good news, I suppose, is that today is going to be sunny and perfect. Around 70 degrees.

***

I am always conflicted about this holiday because I find it awful that people have had to fight wars. In the length of human existence, how can it be that we still try and solve differing viewpoints by killing one another?

Many among us proclaim that we are a nation with religious values. If that were really so, would we have been involved in state-sanctioned murder of other humans so many times? Would we have ever believed that we had to send our children to their demise to win an argument?

For those brave soldiers who gave everything, I suppose we owe them a debt of gratitude at the very least. My hope is that one day we can be a nation that looks at this day is a quaint relic of a time when we took crude, savage approaches to conflict resolution.