"That's My Flag!"
Sights & Stamps #2
My daughter has a small American flag that she likes to wave around, regardless of the time of year. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Cinco de Mayo, among others, are all days on which I have personally seen her proudly and enthusiastically wave her flag around. She considers the flag among her favorite toys, and gets a kick out of the flapping noise it makes when waving. She recognizes the flag as that of the United States, but will “correct” you if you tell her it’s the “American flag,” identifying it instead by saying “that’s my flag”. In some ways, you could say she has a strong respect for the American flag, however humorous her childlike innocence displays it.
I, of course, also have a deep respect not just for the flag, but for veterans who stood up and defended it at home and abroad, my dad being among them with his naval service in the 1970s. A large number of small towns and big cities across the country share my respect for those who have served our country, and they dedicate a memorial to veterans to thank them for their service. Whether it’s through a grand monument like the memorial in downtown Indianapolis, IN, or the more grassroots level patriotism shown in my hometown of LaGrange Park, IL, honoring our veterans is a pretty common theme across the country.
I like to visit these veterans memorials whenever I take a road trip and find myself driving through such and such a town. While it may seem random to stop in a random town to look at its memorial, I find it worthwhile for a couple of reasons. On one hand, I figure that somebody built this memorial and the town takes some degree of pride in it, and therefore it deserves to be appreciated with a few minutes of my time, even while so many others drive on by without a second thought. On the other hand, stopping at such places gives me a chance to honor those who served, and privately thank those who gave the ultimate sacrifice and never came back.
All of this is to say that Plano, TX has a veterans memorial too, and it’s practically across the street from my daughter’s daycare. Since it’s not in an out-of-town location that I’ll only have one chance to see, I had never made time to go and see it. The busyness of life generally got in the way, and on some level I suppose I just thought, “I’ll go and see it someday, just not today.” As a result, I have driven past it hundreds of times, and like so many other cars have done, I hardly paid any attention to it.
But then I came across this stamp of the American flag, US #3508.
There is hardly anything special about this stamp, just another depiction of our nation’s flag, joining hundreds of others that have shown the same subject throughout the decades. But as someone who enjoys collecting postmarks as well, my eye was mainly drawn to the cancellation shown here in the lower right corner, the one word of which that can be clearly seen reads: “PLANO”. Having been the one to soak this stamp off of the envelope, I can confirm that this cancellation was from the post office in Plano, TX, the same town I live in!
I suppose this could have been used for one of my “Postmarks & Places” articles, and I may very well do that in the future. For now, though, this stamp inspired me to finally go and visit the Plano Veterans Memorial. After all, where else is more appropriate to find an American flag? So earlier this month, I picked my daughter up from daycare one day, and we went to spend a few minutes taking a long-overdue closer look at the memorial. And as soon as we got out of the car, my daughter Martha saw the American flag flapping in the wind, and she excitedly exclaimed, “Daddy, look! That’s my flag!” Such a patriotic little girl, isn’t she?
She spent time running around on the grass and burning off some energy while I snapped a few photos, some of which can be seen here.
I also began telling her about the memorial, what its purpose was, what a veteran is, and why we honor them. She’s only three, so I can’t expect her to comprehend the subject matter too much, but I did make a point of telling her the following:
“Everything we have in our lives, we only have because of veterans. That’s why we come to a memorial like this to say thank you.”
I repeated that a few times, she seemed to understand, and before long she was walking up to the statues on display at the memorial and saying, “thank you”. She even hugged one of them. As adorable as that was, her attitude of gratitude continued at home during bedtime when she thanked the veterans for her stuffed giraffe, so it’s hard to say exactly how much of the lesson sank in completely.
All in all though, it was nice to take time for a pause and reflect on what we have in this country, the relatively carefree attitude we are blessed to live with, and the price so many veterans paid to give it to us. As they say, freedom is never free. I look at this stamp and am reminded of the battle scars our flag carries with it, and the courage of everyone who has stood up to defend it. Franklin D. Roosevelt put it best when he said, “Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.”
With this year being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an event of such profound importance in world history and so central to the American identity that we rarely take a moment to understand the bravery of those delegates at the Continental Congress, this average flag stamp inspires me to reflect on the immense implications of that declaration. Those men were committing treason, taking a massive gamble on 13 plucky underdeveloped and sparsely populated colonies, and betting on them to prevail against the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Victory would bring freedom, but defeat would surely cost them their lives and everything they held dear. Take a moment someday and read about what happened to some of these signatories, several of whom suffered greatly in the name of furthering the cause for liberty.
The odds were against them, and yet these men bravely signed their names on a treasonous document—their death warrant had a few key moments in the war gone differently. Those men put their lives on the line for what was only a dream in 1776, and our veterans throughout the last 250 years have continued to put their lives on the line defending the reality of freedom that was initiated by the courage of a few dozen good men in Lexington and punctuated by the signatures of even fewer men in Philadelphia.
This isn’t just a flag stamp, it’s a reminder for me to take a moment and be grateful for what we have in this country, and for every person throughout history who put their lives on the line to defend it. Those who fought in the Revolution, the Civil War, the World Wars, my dad’s service at the tail end of Vietnam, and all those men and women from Plano, TX for whom this memorial is dedicated. To all of them, we owe a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
All of this from an average flag stamp with the Plano postmarking, and a little daddy-daughter time with Martha. It just goes to show that while stamps depict subjects that can be found all over the country and all across the spectrum of time, there are connections to be made even in our hometowns.