{"id":1748,"date":"2012-11-11T23:40:59","date_gmt":"2012-11-11T12:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.wordpress.com\/?p=1748"},"modified":"2012-11-11T23:40:59","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T12:40:59","slug":"at-the-going-down-of-the-sun-and-in-the-morning-11112012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=1748","title":{"rendered":"At The Going Down of the Sun, and in the Morning \u2013 [11\/11\/2012]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It never feels right that it isn\u2019t raining. It\u2019s always raining. Anyone you talk to about Armistice Day services remembers that as\u00a0 child it was always raining, and you had no idea why you had to be there, you just did, and it was wet and cold and you didn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n

Standing at sunrise under the skudding clouds of an Australian sky, I was no longer wet and cold, but I still didn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n

I will never truly figure out when or how Armistice Day became important to me, when I stopped being the little girl who was taken in her Sunday best to the Cenotaph and really cared more about looking pretty and feeling grown up than about what she was actually supposed to be paying attention to, and started being the woman who weeps because she knows why she\u2019s standing there. She may not understand it, but she knows.<\/p>\n

Like so many things in my generation, I suspect it started with 9\/11. Before that, it was all about the past, not really, but mostly. I could believe that then, I could believe that it somehow didn\u2019t relate to me. It belonged to another era, belonged to Glenn Miller and Vera Lynn and screaming air-raid sirens and bluebirds over Dover. It wasn\u2019t mine. Then two planes shattered the world and it was mine. It was everyone\u2019s, all over again.<\/p>\n

I worked for the military once. I wasn\u2019t in the military, I just worked for them. One of the many civvies who did admin work and fetched coffee on our local naval base. I was fairly decent at my job, and I knew the guys I worked with well enough that I laughed when they flirted with me instead of being upset by it, it was probably the first time in my life I even came close to holding my own.\u00a0 When I stood watching the ships go out in early October of 2001, I knew the boys who were on them. Not all by name, but I\u2019d seen almost all of them on a day to day basis, some of them had bought me coffee. They had names. All of them had names. I stood next to my parents and watched, and I wept for the pointlessness of it all. The utter and sheer pointlessness.<\/p>\n

I think it was then, after all those years of not going, or paying it lip service, that this day started meaning something to me. So many of them didn\u2019t come back. Not then, not now. Some things simply don\u2019t change, even when they should have changed long, long ago.<\/p>\n

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
\nWe will remember them<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It never feels right that it isn\u2019t raining. It\u2019s always raining. Anyone you talk to about Armistice Day services remembers that as\u00a0 child it was always raining, and you had no idea why you had to be there, you just … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-below-the-waterline","category-grand-asiaaustralia-2012"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-sc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}