Memorial Day, MAGA Men, and the Art of Living Together

 

In her ongoing chronicle of life inside a Continuum Care Community, Jean returns to Memorial Day with equal parts honesty, humor, and hard‑won perspective. What begins as a reluctant decision to attend a campus ceremony becomes a meditation on patriotism, personality clashes, and the strange intimacy of communal living. Along the way she encounters the usual cast of characters — the generous, the sentimental, the maddening, and the unforgettable — and finds herself, almost despite herself, grateful for the complicated little world she now calls home…. AI

Last year I skipped our Memorial Day event here at the Continuum Care Campus (which they hold four days before the holiday but that's the way they do things to give employees time off with their families). I had two reasons for skipping it, and I’ll quote myself from the post I wrote back then: "I couldn't bring myself to go because a guy from my building planned to read the entire Constitution, and I'd have a terrible time hearing it from the lips of a rabid Trump and MAGA supporter. And two, because I felt like a fraud last year singing along with all the patriotic songs when I wasn’t all that proud of our country. Asking God to bless our ‘Great Nation’ felt like pretending we were still the same beacon of freedom and hope we used to be.”

I’m not alone in avoiding this man. At our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event (more on that later), I learned that at least half a dozen residents have asked the dining staff never to seat them with or near him. He’s surly, swears at the servers, and tells anyone who asks about our Independent Living community, “Don’t come here. It’s awful.” His bad attitude started when management informed him that we are a gun‑free campus and his massive collection had to go home with his sons or they'd take legal action to evict him. He still warns people that we’ll be sorry if a mass shooter storms the building because he “could pick them off from his balcony.” A surly old man with a gun. What could go wrong?

This year I still didn’t want to sing God Bless America. Blessing America when our leader behaves like a spoiled child feels a bit like saying, “You’re doing great — here’s your reward.” But I decided I shouldn’t let one person keep me from honoring the other veterans who would be participating. We have roughly a dozen Vietnam vets here, all of them former commissioned officers. You can draw your own conclusions about why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the upper‑middle‑class backgrounds that CCCs tend to draw from. During Vietnam, these men had families who kept them in college long enough to get deferments, then commissions. A couple have even admitted they enlisted after college so they could choose their military branch and job rather than wait to be drafted into the infantry.

This year our Life Enrichment Director took the lead instead of Mr. MAGA, and the difference was noticeable. She read a lovely two‑page essay which I later learned was written by Artificial Intelligence. When I complimented her, she said, “I put some ideas into ChatGPT and let it compose something much more eloquent than I could.” She also read three poignant poems and showed a nine‑minute video titled Flanders Field: Remembering Their Sacrifice. The YouTube description says it “serves as an orientation to the Great War, the cemetery, and the American Battle Monuments Commission.” Several of the clips from black‑and‑white newsreels shocked me — and I don’t shock easily. The image of hundreds flag-draped caskets waiting to be loaded onto ships took my breath away.

Near the end of the Memorial Day event, our LED invited anyone to share a story about their own service or that of a loved one. Five or six did. Mr. MAGA did not. And while I still refused to sing God Bless America with the others, I was glad I went.

The next day brought a very different kind of gathering: the 90th birthday party for our resident retired lawyer. He has two sons and a daughter and a gaggle of grandkids and great-grands and 17 of them flew in from all over the country. They have a charming tradition of a nightly 7:00 p.m. Zoom call — sometimes twenty people on the call,  other times just four or five but they’ve never missed a night in the four and a half years their dad has lived here. The party itself was first‑class and catered and everyone who lives or works here was invited. He and I both moved in the first week the CCC opened, and I can’t imagine this place without quirky him and his generosity. While I might donate ten or twenty dollars to various collections, he donates a hundred. Five hundred. A thousand. He calls himself the Mayor of our CCC and insists on sitting at the head of any dining table. He also has tender ears and will flee the room if anyone mentions menopause or female anatomy issues. He's also sentimental and cries easily and he didn't make it through the party without shedding tears. Yes, we have characters here.

Speaking of characters, I promised to circle back to our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event. Communities like this naturally form cliques — nothing malicious, just people gravitating toward others with similar interests. You often see the same four to six people eating together. But these cliques aren’t exclusive. Anyone could call any group and ask to join their reservation, and they’d make room. New residents are routinely invited to various tables as we get to know them. We even have unofficial ambassadors who make a point of introducing newcomers and connecting them with people who share a background or hobby.

A couple of high‑octane women decided to shake things up. They created a sign‑up sheet for anyone willing to sit with someone new, then they matched us into mystery dinner groups. We didn’t know who we’d be eating with until we arrived at the dining room. It was something like speed dating — not that I’ve ever done it, but I’ve seen it on TV — in that we all asked and answered the same questions: Where did you live before this? What was your career? Where did you go to college? Kids? Grandkids? Hobbies? Two people at my table found out they both taught in the same school district and knew some of the same people. 

This is the third year we’ve done a 'Guess Who' dinner, and I enjoyed it twice. The year I didn’t, I was seated with Mr. MAGA. This year he didn’t sign up, so the rest of us were free to enjoy the excitement of meeting people we knew by sight and name but had never had a real conversation with. And as the two lady organizers say, "If you don't click with your assigned tablemates, it's just ONE dinner." 

Community living isn’t always peaceful — it’s more like being adopted into a sitcom you never auditioned for. But weekends like this remind me why I keep showing up anyway. Between the veterans, the birthday party and the mystery dinner, I found myself oddly grateful for this cast of characters. Even the ones who make me mutter under my breath. Maybe especially them. After all, every good ensemble needs at least one antagonist to keep the plot moving — and to give me blog fodder. © 

  Flanders Field: Remembering their Sacrifice