NEW YORK — There are two Memorial Days: the one that throws Frisbees on the beach, and the one that marches in the parade, behind the high school band, shiny little pins on its snug dress blues. Taco salad and taps, SPF and VFW, the grill and the wreath.
To be jerked from the first to the other is a lonesome thing.
Carmen Palmer-Thompkins was at the grill last year, like every other year. Her son, Bernard Gooden, a Marine corporal, was 21 years old then, eight months away from his orders to deploy to Iraq, 312 days from the firefight that killed him on April 4.
"He fought for 6 1/2 hours," Palmer-Thompkins said. "He put up a good fight."
Last Memorial Day seems more like a selfish fantasy than a simple cookout, seems much further away than one year. Everything is different.
"Memorial Day used to be barbecues and hanging out with your friends," Palmer-Thompkins, 43, said from her home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. "We used to do that Memorial Day, but we didn't think of it as a greater thing than that," she said. "Until it's in your back yard, you don't know the significance to you."
In your back yard, literally — where the grill is now. "How can you have your son just killed and do the things you used to do?" she asked. "I hope people will think of it deeper than barbecuing and think of those guys who went to Iraq and were away from their families."
This year, she has been invited to join a parade and a wreath ceremony for Westchester County's only Iraq casualty. She is part of a small, new group of New York mothers and sisters and brothers and sons, stumbling through a new Memorial Day, separate from the other holiday, the one that is fun.
Listen to Hyda Hernandez. She could be an irritated grandmother bemoaning youth's disrespect for history: "They don't think about it. Another federal holiday, they're off from work, off from school. They don't see it." She is 38, in Maspeth, Queens. Her brother, Cpl. Robert M. Rodriguez, was in a tank that rolled off a bridge and into the Euphrates River on March 27, killing him and three other Marines. She will catch the parade at Grand Avenue.
New York declared the day a holiday back in 1873, and the rest of the Northern states followed. May 30 was Memorial Day, every year, a day marked by children carrying flowers to the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers.
But the grill was not far behind. Just 15 years later, in 1888, a group of frustrated veterans gathered to condemn, by proclamation, "indulgence in public sports, pastimes and all amusements on Memorial Day."
Then, many people knew names on graves. There were 620,000 Confederate and Union dead. By comparison, Operation Iraqi Freedom's surviving family members are a grim little club, mourning 160.
"People may be motivated to observe the holiday in a more meaningful way," said James M. McPherson, a history professor at Princeton University and author of "Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg." "It will be more meaningful in communities that have lost somebody."
He said Memorial Day long ago stopped being a memorial, and became instead the front door to summer. It was "trivialized," he said, by the law in 1968 that changed the date to the last Monday in May. "For most people, it means a day off," he said. "The tradition has faded in most communities. Flags go up, but that's about it."
It gets confusing, especially this year.
In the Seneca County town of Waterloo, N.Y., one of the towns that considers itself the birthplace of Memorial Day, the annual pizza eating contest begins at 5 p.m. The first one to finish an entire cheese pizza ("displaying an open mouth to the judges," the rules state) wins a trophy and a $25 gift certificate for more pizza.
At the farthest other extreme of the day, in Brooklyn, the family of Spc. Rasheed Sahib will visit his fresh grave, just two days old. He was killed May 18 when a fellow soldier's gun discharged during cleaning. The body arrived in the United States only on Thursday, and Sahib was buried Saturday.
"Now we understand, what is the 'Memorial' in Memorial Day," said Zina Samad, 39, of Miami, the soldier's aunt. "It is a day to be mourned, not to be celebrated."
She, too, recalls last year in the backyard. Sahib loved Memorial Day. "He would go over by his grandfather and sit. He loved his family," Samad said. "We all sat in the backyard and celebrated. Barbecue chicken. Steak.
"It will never happen again."
Streaming home on airplanes and ships, the living Marine, soldier, sailor, pilot. There is at least one place, it seems, where both Memorial Days come together.
There is a house in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Inside is Lt. Jonathan Eckstein, 30, a Marine surgeon with an artillery battalion, back from Iraq five days now, about a week away from moving to Inwood on Long Island to complete his residency and begin his medical practice.
On April 22, a group of Marines near Kut were shooting off seized Iraqi weapons. The rocket-propelled grenade launcher, perched on the shoulder of a Marine, worked fine twice. The third round exploded in the tube, spraying shrapnel behind and to the side, into a knot of Marines who were watching or waiting their turns.
Eckstein treated six of the wounded, pulling chunks of shrapnel from flesh, stabilizing the men before helicopters took them out of the field. Two other Marines died, Chief Warrant Officers Robert William Channell Jr. and Andrew Todd Arnold, well known in the battalion, popular men.
"It didn't seem real," Eckstein said later. "It was surreal, for days. A week later, me and my guys all sat down and talked about it. That was like mourning, for us."
His Memorial Day, then: "I've gotten through mourning. It's a celebration. It's being back. It's being here with my family, my friends."
Finally, real burgers. Among the Marines, the hands-down most sought-after Meal-Ready-to-Eat packet is No. 8. It is the first envelope liberated from any just-opened case of MREs. The beef patty. It is an oddly rectangular shape, and the two pieces of "wheat snack bread" are fortified and chewy, but in the desert, it is the closest thing to a hamburger. The closest thing to the grill.