Memorial Day, without the grape soda

When Sunday morning rolls around, God willing and the creek don't rise, I will be standing in front of a group of people gathered at Mountain View Cemetery in Des Arc, Mo., for the annual Memorial Day service.

There will be singing and praying. And me.

I'm the morning's featured speaker. It's not the first time. I have to take being invited back as a good sign.

If you don't know anything about Des Arc, you're not alone. It's a tiny community at the very bottom of the southern leg of Iron County. By my reckoning, there are far more people lying under tombstones in Mountain View Cemetery than there are residing in the mostly white-frame houses along the street that parallels the old railroad bed stretching through the center of town.

Des Arc has a special place in my heart for a lot of reasons.

For one thing, the population of Mountain View Cemetery includes a chunk of my relatives, although most of them are what you might call kissing cousins. But since moving to Cape Girardeau 11 years ago, I've discovered, thanks to the energetic genealogists in various branches of the family, that just about everyone is a kissing cousin. For example, I have been informed that former secretary of state Bekki Cook is a fifth cousin. And so is movie actor Billy Bob Thornton.

Try to figure that out.

I'm not really sure what being a fifth cousin means -- much less how it is calculated. Every time I have this discussion with my mother or with other family members who have suddenly taken an interest in our ancestors, there ensues a lengthy debate over whether someone is a first, second or third cousin -- or a cousin twice removed or some such.

If our grandparents had paid more attention to details like this, we wouldn't be spending all this time looking for our forebears. There would be neat lists of great-great this, that and the other tucked away in the old family Bible or maybe folded up in a shoebox of old photographs.

But such is not the case. In my family, several cousins have expressed an interest mainly in my mother's side of the family and have dabbled in collecting information, much of it erroneous. But that's history for you: We tend to record that which suits us best. Always have. Always will.

Another reason Des Arc is so special to me is because some of my earliest childhood memories include attending a camp meeting there. If you have never been to a camp meeting, you don't know what you've missed.

The Des Arc camp meetings were religious revivals conducted under a large, open-sided tabernacle which is still standing, although it is, like so many of us who were exposed to hellfire and brimstone within its confines, sagging and leaning a bit. My mother remembers when she was a child that families gathered at the tabernacle and camped out for a week at a time. Hence, camp meeting.

Des Arc also was the turnoff from Highway 34 to reach Brushy Creek, where my mother was born and where all of her relatives are buried at Meadows Cemetery, the anchor of family reunions and graveyard-cleaning events.

And Des Arc is where Johnny Collier had his service station with the pop cooler full of ice-cold water and an unlimited supply of Nehi grape soda and Royal Crown Cola. Can a summer day in Southeast Missouri get any better than that?

So that's where I'll be Sunday. Minus the Nehi grape soda, I fear.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.