I am grateful tonight that for this Memorial’s Day, I was able to spend it with my family.

It started at 1 PM at a Blake’s Lotaburger, because Lotaburger is New Mexico’s burger, and the bags and fry bags and sandwich wrappers are all in red, white, and blue, and there is no personal cooking or cleanup involved. It was my parents, my sister and her family, and myself. And beef and cheese and green chile, and a card game, and a conversation about machine learning and survivor’s bias, and familiar and beloved laughter.

After lunch, I played a card game with my mom for an hour at my folk’s house until the family day continued at my sister’s at 4PM.

For some of the people at party, part II, the get-together was a card game in the kitchen. For others, it was video game time on the TV. For a few more, it was play time on a 3-D printer. For me and my dad, it was mostly sitting out on the back porch feeling the cool breeze wind around us as we watched birds feed and flit and play nearby and people walk in the open space behind my sister’s home and clouds linger and evolve above us in the regal blue sky, and we chatted.

Dad remembered more about coming to New Mexico, about his near miss and almost not getting a job at Sandia, about Lazapping back in the 80’s, nights spent shooting beams into the sky to wake up distant floating brain bins, about changes in the Labs, and good managers, and not so good managers, and his fortune at how things worked out for him there.

We sat outside for quite a while until the sun started to drop and cool and the breezes nipped a bit. “it’s getting a little cool out here. Do you think we should go in?” “Yeah.”

We had microwaved cherry pie with ice cream on top of it, and it was icy warm liquid America, with a flavorful crisp crust.

And in time, my parents and I left my sister’s. Do you want to go to Panda, my Mom asked my Dad? Do you want to go to Panda, she asked me. Sure.

We went on to Panda Express and made sure our guts were full, and then we went to their house where I reset the Direct TV box because it was giving them an error like none of the rooms in their house were authorized for Direct TV.

Before we went in their house, though, the sun was mostly down, and their flag still hung from two hooks screwed into the soffit, centered over the driveway. I reached up and carefully unhooked the flag from one hook and then the other, making sure it hung nowhere close to the ground. I handed it to my Dad and he folded it down the middle longways, and then he folded it again. I took it by its other end, and then as I looked at him, he told me to fold it diagonally, back and forth, toward him.

As his Boy Scouts training had taught him decades ago.

Kind of like men and women in United States military units have done daily around the world, for quite a long time.

At least, in that moment, that’s what went through my mind.

Thank you, honest and earnest American, for committing your time and life to fight for this land and its ideas and ideals, that I am fortunate enough to live in.

Thank you for defending my freedom to enjoy a day like today.