26-05-2025
A holiday remembrance of home
Members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment place flags at the headstones of U.S. military personnel buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in preparation for Memorial Day on May 22, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by)
Science informs us that our sense of smell can evoke vivid memories. The phenomenon is sometimes known as the 'Proust Effect,' for a scene from Marcel Proust's novel 'Remembrance of Things Past,' when a character's childhood memories come flooding back, triggered by the scent of a sweet cake called a madeleine.
For me it's lilacs. Every Memorial Day of my childhood my mother would cut lilacs from the big bush near the back porch of our home in Grand Island. She would bunch them into bouquets and then send my sister and me in search of vases and mason jars to fill with water.
On the trip to the cemetery in the back seat, my sister and I would hold tight to the lilacs and whatever else mom culled from our yard or that of a generous neighbor. Mom would manage my father's driving to keep the sloshing to a minimum.
The car was thick with the unmistakable fragrance of lilacs, an aroma now permanently linked in my memory to Memorial Day. And, sadly, more.
The lilac bush was large enough that anyone passing by on the sidewalk enjoyed the scent.
Rich Gillham knew the smell.
He was two grades ahead of me in school and six blocks to the north of me on Kimball Street, but a childhood friend nonetheless, the way neighborhood friends know each other.
He would pedal by on his bicycle and then, as a teen he would zoom past on his motorcycle — sometimes stopping because he had me on the back hitching a ride home from football practice.
There was an uncluttered ease to Rich, a confidence that this 15-year-old, saddled with a high school sophomore's lack of self-assurance and no driver's license, admired.
My parents didn't want me riding on a motorcycle, but they knew Rich and his parents, Gerald and Ursula, the way neighborhood parents know each other.
Rich never came by as an adult.
He was killed in a place called Dinh Tuong Province, thousands of miles from Kimball Street and the smell of lilacs. He was 20.
I'm not sure I'll remember Rich more this Memorial Day than I do any other day. With war now a modern constant and young men and women from their own streets and neighborhoods in places we call harm's way, he is more on my mind.
I paid my respects to Rich and others when the traveling wall made it to our hometown, where I was overcome with many emotions, not the least of which was the rushing back of a shared and gentle childhood.
War being what it is, we're never far from paying respects and decorating graves and realizing the true and somber meaning of Memorial Day.
Vietnam was my generation's war. Rich was my neighbor and friend who died there, whose life and death touched many, especially those of us from Kimball Street.
We played as kids. Our families shared dinners. Our parents laughed over beers.
In high school, Rich played football his senior year, never getting in a game, but sticking it out nonetheless. And he was always willing to throw me on the back of his little two-wheeler and take me home.
My best last memory of Rich was of him astride his new, powerful Triumph motorcycle, so loud a conversation next to it was impossible.
A group of us were parked at Nifty's Drive-In on South Locust Street when we heard him coming on the Triumph, a growling, snarling monster in faded copper.
We were taken with the clamor and power … and Rich, nonchalant and indifferent to the stares from the curious, the impressed and the disgusted.
He turned it off for a few minutes for a little back and forth chatter, then stomped the Triumph a few times to bring it back to life. He sped off in a cloud of youth and noise.
We made a point to see how far he would get before we could no longer hear him. It was long after he drove out of sight, much to our delight and admiration.
Delight and admiration. That's how I remember my neighbor, the first casualty of war from my childhood.
Come to think of it, delight and admiration could fit millions of memories on Memorial Day.
And maybe throw in the scent of lilacs, too.
(Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published in the Grand Island Independent on May 29, 2011, and is being republished with permission. It has been updated for clarity and to reflect the passage of time.)
