When I was a kid, the calendar divided into average days and holidays. On holidays, there were presents and candy.<\/p>\n
Then the presents\u2014and the holidays\u2014lost their luster. I still remember the first birthday I got an electric razor and socks. Over time, I learned Jesus of Nazareth was not born on December 25th, Thanksgiving didn\u2019t give the full story on Native Americans, and the Easter Bunny might be a pagan fertility symbol<\/a>.<\/p>\n Eventually, I stopped wanting to get older altogether.<\/p>\n Holidays became about people. My mother held great open house parties and I loved to see our extended friends and family. Celebrations and get-togethers happened not on the day, but when it was convenient. The used-car-sale holidays too\u2014President\u2019s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, any federal holiday that landed on a Monday\u2014were clearly not a date, but rather a three-day excuse for a road trip to the cabin.<\/p>\n Veteran\u2019s Day reminds you the calendar matters. November 11th is not just a date, but a specific hour of remembrance. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918<\/a> ended the Great War. We still commemorate the significance and relief of that anticipated moment, the closing to one of our greatest periods of brutality. Veteran\u2019s Day was \u201cArmistice Day\u201d until 1954, when the second world war\u2019s armistice took precedence.<\/p>\n Dates and times mark the grinding of the clock until they, too, are ground away.<\/p>\n My family has plenty of days of remembrance if I go looking. My mom\u2019s kind and gentle mother, Mary, the only grandmother my sister and I ever knew, died on April 10, 1979. It was devastating for our family, but a different kind of devastation from December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and June 6, 1944. My parents remember the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy because they stepped across those lines on the calendar with everyone else around them.<\/p>\n