Say Their Names
On Memorial Day, and always.
Even in Minnesota, you forget.
You’re busy with travel. With kids. Grandkids. They are so overscheduled these days, it’s exhausting. Finding time to plant those annuals. What about fertilizing? Are we doing No-Mow May this year? Not with all the rain. Some of us have mowed two, even three times.
A miracle: the rabbits have not destroyed everything. My azalea came back. So did the mock orange. The mugo pine was a loss, but not a tragedy. Could be worse is a Minnesota mantra.
It’s a good year for lilacs. My fragrant, blue-blushed French cultivar handed the baton to pink Miss Kim. The bloomerang — so named because it blooms in spring and in fall — was next. The neglected “common” variety — taken from my childhood home — bends heavily over its trellis. The progression of blossoming, one variety after another, softens my heart.
Way too late in the season, I begin to dig up the weeds crowding my lily of the valley. Thin the hosta. Push a wheelbarrow full of Solomon’s seal down the sidewalk to one of the six women named Mary who live on my block in once-solidly Catholic St. Paul. (I was raised Lutheran in the suburbs. Neighbors joke that that they took a vote before allowing me to move in. My name tipped the balance in my favor.)
The ice is gone. ICE is gone.
So are Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot and killed in January by agents of our own government. George Floyd, crushed under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day exactly six years ago.
Say their names.
On Saturday, I met a couple of friends at the Black Forest Inn restaurant. A Minneapolis institution, it’s located half a block from the site where Alex Pretti was gunned down by masked federal agents. Seconds earlier, he’d leaned to help a woman from the snowbank where other federal agents had pushed her.
“We used to walk here, when I lived on Groveland.”
“How far was that?” Karen asked. “Did you feel safe?”
My rehabbed apartment faced a church known for its handsome stone exterior and excellent music. My fellow tenants were grad students, artists, designers, academics, and the man I met when I was twenty. The one I did not marry.
“About a mile. Safe? Mostly. I never came here alone.”
That night coming back from the Art Institute, where I was taking a class. It was a January evening, but the bus was late and the temperature in the mid-thirties. I decided to walk. Even in my long wool coat, hair wrapped in a bun, arms full of books, the men in those cars saw only Young. Female. They pulled to the curb. Reached over to unlock their Buicks and Cadillacs. That guy in the shadows — I took a shower after I’d locked the door behind me. Then I called the man I did not marry.
“You what? And expected something different?”
Yes. I expected safety. But so did Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
I looked around the restaurant. Hand-painted murals of hunting scenes covered the walls. Coats of arms and antlers completed the look. Was the Black Forest Inn the only place in my life that had never changed?
“The first time I came here, I was in sixth grade.”
A field trip. We were studying German. I ate spargel and. warm kartoffelsalat. Spätzle. Ordering in German, I felt cosmopolitan.
“How long ago?” My incredulous friends are from California.
“58 years.”
Who could have guessed that this unassuming place would one day feed protesters in a city occupied by its own government? Patrons paid what they could afford, knowing that many businesses were shutting down out of a new kind of fear. There was no way, no way, that this bohemian neighborhood would see teargas, marauding thugs, two shocking murders following another one on a Memorial Day six years earlier. That there would be demonstrations, incidents recorded on pocket-sized phones with cameras, and surreptitious food deliveries to safe houses. At age twelve, I worried about umlauts.
Due to Minnesota’s two seasons — winter and road repair — I did not navigate the closed roads and detours to Renee Good’s memorial site or George Floyd Square. I went home to my lilacs and lily of the valley. With every hard shove of my spade into the earth, I thought of those three murdered humans. Today, I say their names, and those of others.
My husband’s name. Gone three years now, he worked hard to plant and nurture a yard that four decades ago was nothing but scrub and scruff. My mother’s name. The last Mothers’ Day picnic near the “common” lilacs in her yard. My father’s name. I planted a rose in his memory, called “Hope for Humanity.”
Let us never lose hope.
How are you honoring your loved ones, the bright souls taken too early from this earth, your heroes? How do you remember them? Tell me in the Comments. Say their names.
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Wishing you growth and beauty on this Memorial Day.
~ Mary
My "Big" Sister Nancy died by her own doing, aged 49. I finally found forgiveness 20 years after, going to her grave, cleaning the headstone, and leaving roses, her favorite flower. I do it every year now. If anyone else visits her grave, they'll know there's another who has not forgotten her, but more importantly, one who has forgiven her.
Another beauty, Mary. I love the juxtaposition of your flowering garden and the dead you mourn, along with your city. This essay landed in my queue just as I prepared to work on my next essay, also called "Say Their Names." It crossed my mind to change the title, but no. "Say Their Names" would make a great prompt. We all have a story about saying names, no two alike. Our stories are rivers flowing to the same ocean.