From my Substack and newsletter Rhonda's Lanes ....
Something has been lurking in my mind about Memorial Day.
In the category of “this could be a bad idea,” I feel like talking about Memorial Day within the context of my novel Fatal Image: An Avery Sloane Mystery.
FWIW, I’m not doing this to sell books. Well, not in this post.
I want use a passage from Fatal Image as a lead-in.
Before that scene, though, you might want to know about the characters speaking …
Avery Sloane, the main character and narrator of Fatal Image, was a conflict photographer in the Middle East but now works as a reporter at a small-town, family-run newspaper owned by the moneyed Clark Kinsale.
The scene happens in the storefront newsroom at the weekly staff meeting. The owner publisher Kinsale has stopped to guide coverage as this is the first meeting after a lurid murder.
Let’s drop in as Avery narrates some of the weekly staff meeting:
Leave it to me to have to poke the bear while I was ahead.
“Memorial Day is about those who died in war,” I said with a furrowed brow implying ‘pardon me’ but not. “Veterans Day is about those who got to come home. The troops are aware of the difference.”
Granted I first wrote that passage a long time ago, but I think I meant to say country but there’s county, right there and forever. Something spellcheck would ignore. Typo or Freudian slip, county still fits the vibe.
Avery’s new job is based on my old job as a general assignment reporter who also happened to be a photographer with her own gear at a small family-owned suburban daily newspaper in New England.
The weekly staff meetings? Yup. The owner publisher never showed up at ours, though they would’ve had to drive about fifteen miles to us. All the bureau chief editors went to them every week.
I also covered the Memorial Day activities from the early morning ceremonial visits with the local veterans to each cemetery and park to decorate and salute the monument there to veterans. Then, I’d cover the parade, which is where I learned about the Gold Star Mothers.
One of the things I’d noticed that, even though sometimes the local veterans would invite me back to the Legion Hall for coffee before the parade, I never picked up on the distinction between Memorial Day being about those lost at war but Veteran’s Day for the troops who returned until I did my research for Fatal Image.
Many years after my reporter days, I read all sorts of troop and journalist memoirs about the Iraq war. My rule was, if one person experienced something, that was their story. If another person experienced something similar—or better yet, a third person reported it, too—I considered it fair game for me to give to Avery.
Many of those books are still in a shelf next to my desk/ Some are still in my local public library. And some are on various e-readers I own, complete with digital highlighting.