Memorial Day

Laurel city offices will be closed Monday, May 30 for Memorial Day. Trash and recycling usually picked up Monday will be collected Tuesday, May 31. Tuesday's collections will be Wednesday, June 1. There will be no scheduled special pickups Wednesday. Government offices in Prince George's, Howard and Anne Arundel counties will be closed Monday, May 30, and no trash or curbside recycling collections will be made. Trash and recycling collections will resume on the next regularly scheduled collection day.

Even with gasoline prices at near-record levels, Marylanders are expected to travel during Memorial Day weekend in the same robust numbers as last year, AAA Mid-Atlantic predicts. But to make sure potential visitors aren't discouraged by the price at the pumps, some Ocean City hotels are offering vouchers good for up to $50 in gas for guests who book for multiple days. Judging by its forecast Tuesday, AAA doesn't think Marylanders will need much of a push to get on the road. AAA predicts that 719,400 Marylanders will go on vacation this holiday weekend, roughly the same number as last Memorial Day. Of those expected to travel 50 miles or more, 644,000 people will be on the road, a decline of 0.7 percent, attributed largely to gasoline prices.

I liven in a relatively well off neighborhood. The majority of the people in the neighborhood stand for American family values and are not bashful about denouncing people who don't meet their standards. I am fairly liberal, retired military. Most of that service came about not because of any burning desire to fight the enemy but because I felt it was my duty. I was proud of the work I did. On Memorial Day I thought that it was right that I display my flag in respect for those who died serving their country.

Reading this weekend's Sunpapers, which featured the military loved ones we lost this year and those we have lost in this long war, for which no end is yet in sight, was so sad. Even more the thought that family and friends of those lost or severely injured may feel they are being forgotten in these difficult times in our country saddened me even more. Please do what you can in future articles to assure them that is not so. I joined hundreds of Marylanders Monday at the memorial service at Dulaney Memorial Gardens to honor and remember them and greet the many veterans of other wars who were also there.

Baltimore police detectives were busy Sunday investigating six separate shooting incidents over the weekend, four of them fatal. The first man to die in the rash of shootings was Ronald Anderson, 30, who was pronounced dead shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday at Harbor Hospital, less than an hour after police responded to a report of gunshots in the 4100 block of Pennington Ave. in the Curtis Bay area and found him wounded. Anderson's home address was undetermined. Davon Dorsey, 18, for whom no address was available, was pronounced dead at 4:25 a.m. Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital, three hours after an incident in the 400 block of N. Rose St. in East Baltimore.

You had to knock loud, above the whir of air conditioning and the squeals from the community pool across the street. But eventually Michael Waters-Bey appeared. Not on the porch, where seven years ago he'd held a photo of his only son up for the television cameras, and implored the president to take a hard look at the price his family had paid for the war in Iraq. This time he came to an upstairs window. He lifted the sash, leaned out and politely declined to talk about his son, the war, Memorial Day or anything else.

Harold Harvard thought things had improved in his Southwest Baltimore neighborhood since a stray bullet wounded a 5-year-old girl last summer. But after three fatal shootings Sunday just steps from his home — part of a barrage of bullets that left eight dead and three injured across the city over the holiday weekend — he's declared that serenity short-lived. "I'm scared," the 43-year-old said bluntly on Monday, standing outside his Ramsay Street home where a police cruiser had been idling all morning and a few American flags hung limply in the heat.

I am ambivalent about Memorial Day. On the one hand, it offends me that, for most Americans, Memorial Day has become just another holiday weekend — a getaway to the beach, the opening of the pool, a sale at the garden center. I once served as an Army nurse, in a stateside hospital to which wounded soldiers were evacuated regularly. So for me, the "memorial" part of the weekend always overshadows the "holiday" part. While I'm firing up the grill and watching for the kids and grandkids to arrive, remembrance rolls in out of the blue, like a solemn cortege.

When 6-year-old Connor Johns visits Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens on Monday, he will be wearing the combat fatigues that his half-brother, Jordan, picked out for him before he was deployed in Afghanistan. "He wears that outfit constantly," said Kandy Poole Johns, the boys' mother. "Connor loved Jordan, looked up to him as his hero and will always remember him as a Marine." Twenty-four-year-old Lance Cpl. Jordan Chrobot of Frederick, who died last Sept. 26 during a firefight in Helmand province, was one of 10 Marylanders killed in Afghanistan since last Memorial Day. The state's 12-month toll is the highest since the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom in response to the attacks of Sept.