Flag Day

My Cub Scout den mother has always been one of my favorite people, and time has done nothing to diminish my affection. I’ll never forget the day she took us on a hike, five miles round-trip, to Crest Lawn cemetery – just to see the American flag flying there.

Mrs. Blohm was a tall, beautiful woman with an earnest face that opened easily into laughter. The boys in my den were my best friends in the world. Sitting on her screened-in porch, we held true to the Scout symbolism: a litter of yapping wolf, bear, or lion cubs learning from a woods-smart mother.

Mrs. Blohm understood the boy-animal: what to teach us, when to feed us, how to bring us to bay. She appreciated the humor of 10-year-old boys. She also understood our most cherished secret: what it was that could make us afraid.

It had been a strange day at school before that Friday afternoon den meeting. Something happened more startling than a fire drill, or the air-raid rehearsals mandated by Civil Defense. Normally, we had plenty of opportunity to be silly under our desks, shielding our faces from shattering glass and an A-bomb that never came.

No one laughed today.

The fourth-grade teacher came running down the hallway, weeping. We could still hear her behind the closed door of the principal’s office. Her class had been watching Spanish instruction on public TV when a news bulletin broke in.

This was decades before the Columbine and Newtown massacres. Our little grammar school felt as safe as a picture in a children’s book. Usually, we had to manufacture our own excitement.

Not on this day.

At our den meeting the week before, we’d worked on a skit for the pack meeting. We loved the skit, though the premise was simple: a foreign ambassador arriving at the White House to attend a state dinner. The comedy was in the layers of bureaucracy involved.

The head butler asks the ambassador will he wait a moment, please. Then he gives the message to the first housemaid, who passes it on to the cook, who tells the secretary, who tells the chief of staff, who tells John-John, who tells Caroline, who tells Jackie, who enters the oval office and tells the president. My friend Gary had the plum role: imitating the Massachusetts accent of John F. Kennedy. The president turns to Jackie and says, “Tell the ambassador it’s tomorrow night.”

When I got to the den meeting after school that Friday, Mrs. Blohm had the boys lined up in the yard. There would be no skit rehearsal that day – and no performance at the Pack meeting. We were going on a hike.

During our long trek to the cemetery, Mrs. Blohm explained what had happened on this mid-November day in 1963, right at the time of our school lunch period. I wish I could remember her words. I wonder how she found them – how she felt, and thought, and said them.

She talked about the tragedy in such a way that we grasped it, fully and deeply, to last all our lives. Yet, somehow, as we followed her tall form with its official blue skirt and yellow Cub Scout blouse, we felt that our world, though badly shaken, would not come to an end.

As she intoned a prayer for our country and a requiem, of sorts, for the President of the United States, we walked over the final hill and saw the huge flag at Crest Lawn Cemetery, flying at half-mast.