Good morning. It’s Memorial Day, a holiday that honors those who have given their lives in military service to the United States. That is a not inconsiderable number. More than a million Americans have been killed in combat since the birth of the nation, and nearly 7,000 have perished over the course of the past 18 years, as we have waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We’ll get to the burgers and watermelon soon enough, the games of cornhole, the long, lazy afternoon, your family and friends around you, the sense of peace. First, you should read this account of war: a first-person essay from a former Army Ranger, Luke Ryan, whose best friend and three teammates were killed alongside him in Afghanistan in 2013.
The story of their lives and deaths, as my colleague C.J. Chivers has written of those who have fought in this long war, “hold part of the sum of American foreign policy in our time.” Wherever you stand as a citizen in relationship to that policy, you should today think about their service and the price they paid to perform it. Take a moment of silence even if it’s just a moment, you sitting in the car before getting out to pump gas or buy bread or join a cookout. Reflect.
And then, perhaps, you can celebrate life. That’s what we do around dinner tables and sitting on picnic blankets, isn’t it? We bring people close in the presence of food and drink so that we can feed one another, cheer one another and revel in our sheer pleasure at being alive.
While you’re at it, visit us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. You’re like a lobsterman, checking traps for meat.
And do please ask us for help if you find yourself caught sideways with a recipe or our technology: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We’re in service of a sort ourselves here. Someone will get back to you.
Finally, I have no links to novels or movies or songs or paintings today. I want to close as I opened, with the holiday. Here’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a speech delivered on Memorial Day in 1884, in Keene, N.H.: “Every year — in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life — there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.” Pay attention to that. I’ll be back on Wednesday.
