I took a long slow trip yesterday, putting 250 miles on my new car. My main object was to place a small flag on my father's grave, a story which will be posted at my family history journal, No Brief Candle, probably tomorrow. The drive up was uneventful, although I did see an alarming number (four?) of dead deer along the interstate, and one on a wooded stretch of Route 443 near Orwigsburg. That one was lying directly under a "Deer Crossing" sign.

I got rather a later start than I had anticipated, so it was past noon when I arrived in Mahanoy City, the town 60 miles north of Harrisburg where my parents are buried. I'd decided not to bring flowers -- replanting is something my sister and I do together, usually in late June -- just the flag. I'd missed the morning ritual of the American Legion band playing "Taps" at each of the town's seventeen cemeteries, and yesterday's humidity discouraged my plans to visit some unfamiliar plots.

I drove down into town just as the Memorial Day parade was winding down. I saw four or five classic cars draped in bunting. Someone was walking along Centre Street picking up the flags that had been popped into doorways and window ledges. I went into the UniMart for a snack.

Mahanoy City was once a bustling coal town -- in the heyday of anthracite mining in the region it had a population of more than 25,000. With the decline of the coal industry and the construction of the interstate that allowed traffic to bypass the town, Mahanoy City declined to a population today of about 5000.

The Uni-Mart has a deli, a lottery outlet, and an Arby's Roast Beef counter with a small seating area. It's sort of the Cheers of Mahanoy City -- everybody knows your name, and while I was there I listened to a man sitting at the front booth greet everyone who came in and exchange pleasantries. In his voice I heard the cadences of my grandmother's speech, of my Uncle Jim who never lost the accent, of my mother the way she sounded when she was tired.

There was a sign taped to the restroom entrance -- "Out of Order" scrawled in magic marker on lined paper. The sign has been hanging on that door for three years now. I asked the clerk if there might be another bathroom I could use before I had my sandwich.
"Oh," she said, "that's just there to keep the drunks out -- they always mess it up. You go ahead and use it."

Afterward it came into my head to undertake a sentimental journey. I drove down Route 54 through Hometown to Barnesville and turned up the road where the White Birch Golf Course is. My college roommate lived there -- her parents owned the place, and after graduation she returned to the region, married, and worked in the business for a number of years. She sold it after her parents died -- we've been out of regular touch, entirely my fault. We did have several long phone conversations about seven years ago when something from our shared past came back to be dealt with. She was "there" for me then, as she always had been. I miss her.

From there I drove the route my mother must have taken the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Her sister had given birth the day before, and my mother had driven up Sunday morning from Harrisburg to take her mother up to see the new baby. They learned about Pearl Harbor on the radio of my mother's 1939 Chrysler as she drove down the hill into Tamaqua.

From Tamaqua I turned north, determined to find Summit Hill, the town where my mother's sister and her family lived until their youngest child, my cousin Jim who is just three months younger than I, lived until he was seven. Images of visits to that place have been floating through my mind of late, and I wanted to see it again.

It has been 45 years since I last set foot on Market Street in Summit Hill, yet the place was instantly recognizable. I remembered the floor to ceiling windows in Jimmie's living room, the red "insul-brick" exterior, the church at the corner, the iron fence with alternating hoops and spikey finials. We used to climb on that fence, reaching up above our heads to grasp the top rail and pulling up hard with our legs. I was astonished to see that the fence is only three feet tall, and was convinced for a moment that it was a new one. I'm 5'4 -- shouldn't the fence be at least six feet? And then I understood -- 45 years ago three feet was above my head.

I drove down out of the coal hills toward Orwigsburg. On Route 443 I came up on a tractor trailer loaded with crates of chickens. It's two lanes and no passing there, so for about twenty miles I drove into a cloud of feathers, kept my eyes on the sad and stupid-looking birds, and thought about becoming a vegetarian.

At Route 61 I stopped at a McDonald's for a cold drink and to check my map -- I had turned the wrong way and would have to back track about five miles. I sat at a front table and thought about a number of things -- the tricks that memory plays, the need sometimes to let go of the past, a recent thread in an e-mail writers' discussion list that debated the existence of God and very nearly turned ugly, my own recent period of religious doubt and wavering faith. Suddenly the small yew bush in front of the window burst into flames. A careless cigarette toss, I know, from the car that had just passed, but it got my attention.

Readers of this space probably already know how much I value remembering and being remembered. There is no profound conclusion to this piece -- it's  just a chronicle of a Memorial Day in the life.