The Bell Curve: Harvest of hope, memory lives on

Editor's note: Due to an editing error, The Bell Curve failed to appear in Thursday's Daily Pilot. It appears in full below.

Memorial Day — we called it Decoration Day when I was growing up in Indiana — has come and gone, and seemed more full of urgent memories and intensity this year than ever before. Maybe that's because I feel closer to the Civil War as I grow older. There is an increasing awareness as I distance myself from it that I was only two generations away from the violent remnants of slavery in this country, a sobering thought whenever I allow it in.

My grandfather, Robert Patterson, was a colonel in Gen. William Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland. He was wounded in fierce fighting around Murfreesboro, Tenn., and I have a letter he wrote from his hospital bed to the woman back in Decatur, Ind., who became my grandmother. And I never fail to marvel that I shared this Earth for five years with Robert Todd Lincoln, the oldest son of Abraham Lincoln, and the only one to live into maturity.

Decoration Day was created to honor the memory of those who fought to preserve the American Union and — not incidentally — to free the three million men and women trapped in a system that allowed and supported their enslavement as property to be owned and used. Although Decoration Day has acquired a different name and now includes the casualties of all our wars, the Civil War carnage continues to dwarf all the others combined in its carnage.

There were 610,000 soldiers — 2% of the U.S. population at that time — killed in action, as compared with 0.3% in its nearest competitor, World War II. Many Civil War veterans and their families are — like my grandfather — buried in the Decatur cemetery. My parents are there and I will be, too, so that anyone who comes to visit me will find themselves on a Midwestern hillside overlooking my extended family and my beloved Indiana.

These were the sort of connections that brought us together on Decoration Day in my youth. There was always a family picnic in a local park, followed by the same speech, year-after-year, called "Our Flag." It was delivered by my uncle, French Quinn, who had never been in a war. Then we would repair to the cemetery, loaded down with flowers to plant on the appropriate grave sites.