Amongst Memorial Day, Flag Day and Independence Day squirms the most beloved civic holiday of the K-12 bunch: The Last Day of School. Another year of learning the Three Rs and how to get along with each other on the bus, finished. We celebrated with ice cream cones for everybody at the bus stop.

It marked the end of fourth grade for my daughter. It was a consciously civic-minded year for her class. Their introduction to North Carolina history was punctuated with activities in the present: remembering veterans on Veteran's Day, assembling care packages for servicemen and women overseas, visiting the State Capitol and the Legislative building in Raleigh, and collecting for community food drives. Inspiring words from great Americans spoke from posters around the classroom. Not much singing, though.

Ah, the memories. My fourth grade class was introduced to American history, from exploration through the American Revolution. I loved that stuff. Leaving gruff, old Mr. Lerman's homeroom class to learn about it from pleasant Mrs. Mendenhall was a highlight of my day.

But the official lessons were not the ones I found shaken loose and rattling around this past year. Instead, I remember Mr. Lerman telling us, in one of those off-topic discussions, that Veteran's Day was originally Armistice Day. I remember the Thanksgiving play he picked for us to put on, and the things we had to memorize for a class program. Thanks to him, I can still recite the Preamble to the Constitution, my multiplication tables, and sing a bunch of patriotic songs. When the Johnston County band students played 'It's A Grand, Old Flag' in Smithfield on Memorial Day, I knew all the words. Nobody sang.

My daughter didn't ask me when I was in fourth grade but I counted back to tell her anyway. It gave me a jolt, in more ways than one.

I started fourth grade in September of 1972, in the midst of the Munich Olympics, after Mark Spitz won seven gold medals and before Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes. A Star of David monument outside a nearby synagogue had been pleading 'Free Soviet Jewry' for years. They were still fighting in Vietnam and about Vietnam. Nixon was up for re-election against George McGovern, who had beaten some of the unquiet shades of 1968's riots and assassinations to win the Democratic nomination over George Wallace of Alabama (Terry Sanford ran, too). There had been a burglary at a place called Watergate. We were nearly 10 years out from the Supreme Court case banning religion in public schools.

It was in this context Mr. Lerman taught us 'We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility...' and 'She's a grand, old flag, she's a high-flying flag and forever in peace may she wave.'

Did he teach us these songs to show us the kind of nation we could be, to inoculate our future against the hatreds and anxieties swirling around us? Did he do it to counter the anti-American and anti-military feelings surrounding Vietnam, in memory of what that military did in World War II and awareness it might be needed against the Soviets? Did he put these words in our heads, not for us to accept as true here and now but to ponder when we took up our nation's struggles?

I don't know. I do know he cared deeply about us and taught us as if our very lives depended upon it. He was an intense guy.

Things have changed. The Soviets are gone but terrorism is not. The ceremony in Smithfield was necessary because more wars have caused more names to be added to the monument at the courthouse. We still strive for 'a more perfect union.’

The holidays that remind us of the things our fourth grade teachers taught have come and gone, opportunities to sing as a community handed off to trained musicians or neglected all together. Opportunities for a town's worth of different voices to ponder a town's worth of different visions of 'America the Beautiful'--lost. E pluribus unum, if just for a moment, lost.

It is time to plan for next year. I'd like a chance to sing.