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Decoration Days

The tradition of roses and the military go back 2000 years to the Romans. Annually, the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation hands out over 120,000 roses and carnations in Arlington National Cemetery (U.S. Army photo by Rachel Larue)

This coming weekend is Memorial Day weekend, officially an observance to honor fallen soldiers but unofficially the beginning of the summer. We have Congress in 1968 to thank for creating the Uniform Holiday Act, which turned many of our solemn, meaningful observances into convenient three-day weekends, perfect for getaways full of clogged traffic leaving town and home improvement projects that I don’t have enough time to finish because I didn’t start until Monday. On the other hand, the garage could use a spruce up…

I’ve never been able to warm up to Memorial Day, and trying to put my finger on it, I think it’s because of the hypocrisy. To the extent that there’s a typical saying besides “Hot Dogs Half OFF!” or “Beach is Open” or “Maybe there’s a frontage road around this mess…,” the speeches come from politicians determined to shape the idea of sacrifice into a battering ram to justify more use of force. It doesn’t help that every single American war in my lifetime has been about the elite in the US sending the have-not soldiers into places we should not be, but of course that’s not the fault of those in uniform, thank you for your service. (Don’t get me wrong; I would rather have a military than the alternative.) It just too often makes me think of those Jackson Browne lyrics:

I want to know who the men in the shadows are,
I want to hear someone asking them why,
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight and to die…

Jackson Browne “Lives in the Balance”

Still, perhaps in penance for not sufficiently appreciating the sacrifice because of politicians’ crocodile tears, I can offer up a little historical journey. Not why America created Memorial Day because all those bot-churned quasi-stories will trace it to the Civil War. Instead, my question is was putting flowers on military graves always a thing? How did other, older cultures used to celebrate their dead? We’re one of the few cultures that only observes this for one day and restricts it to people in the military.

Meanwhile lots of other cultures, historically, set aside time to remember those who passed before us, especially family members.

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Small Countries A-Z

I like big globes and I cannot lie. Still can’t remember the capital of Uganda, though. Kajmeister photo of Kajmeister.

Somehow, I missed the memo on Nunavut, and my globe ended up broken. However, there is a silver lining. We all get to learn some geography.

During April 2026, I completed an A-Z blog post challenge and in this post I would like to share the post links and tell the story of why I chose this theme. As a quick intro, let me note that the A-Z challenge, created in 2010 by J. Lenni Dorner and friends, encourages bloggers to write 26 posts using letters of the alphabet. People interpret this different ways, but my approach has been to pick a single theme, then write the posts daily during the month of April. The hard part is always Q, J, Z, and X. I cheated on X; I’ll warn you in advance.

I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge for this, my seventh year in a row. I learned a lot from previous years, and it kick-started a book-writing career for me: Olympics, Accounting, Silk Road, didn’t we have fun on Ancient Inventions in 2025? You can even peruse prior years in my top menu, under “Books & A to Z.” This year time was scarce; I was partly doing people’s taxes, writing a book, and then cruising around the Panama Canal. I decided, nevertheless, to take the plunge, pledged to shorten them, and keep them thematic: Small Countries.

Who could resist writing about Panama while going through Panama?

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Z is for Zimbabwe

Fast Facts

  • Named for: Dzimba-dza-mabwe, houses of stone.
  • Capital: Harare
  • Long/Lat: 17.5 S/31.0 E about 20 hours, 13,000 miles east of Castro Valley.
  • Population: 17.2 million, 260 Castro Valleys
  • Size: 150,000 sq mi, 8000 Castro Valleys
  • Avg temp in April: 75 F/24 C
  • Median household income: $1,700 annually
  • Ethnicity: 99.6% Black African
  • Main industries: Platinum, tourism, trade (with South Africa)

We made it! It’s the end of the month and the end of the alphabet. There are only two countries that start with Z (Zanzibar is not a country–keep on learning!). Ironically, those two countries are next to each other. But Zimbabwe is just a little bit older than Zambia, at least in terms of human development, and I found its origin stories a trifle more compelling. Half a million years old is nothing to sneeze at.

Zimbabwe has continually reinvented itself, although that has been one of the through-lines uncovered for many of these A-Z Small Countries. Even the indigenous people are made up of many different people, who have swept in and out, looking for promising things to eat or trade. Empires, kingdoms, usurpers, rebels, leaders in prosperity and strife, new independence which is hard to hold on to: these are the themes of Zimbabwe. Good times attract more strife. Lather, rinse, repeat. All part of the Great Wheel and the long story.

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