COLUMN: Every day should be flag day

It greets the dawn’s early light, clutches the full sun of a cloudless morning and salutes the afternoon shadows as they sweep across the porch.

Whenever a breeze stirs the air, or a summer thunderstorm rolls through, its stars and stripes get tossed and tangled around the pole.

Several times every day, I must unravel our flag and make it presentable, so it won’t have the appearance of a family member with rumpled clothes and disheveled hair. (It never would get high marks for presentation, anyway. The top and bottom of the flagpole are held together with duct tape and wire.)

But that’s the way it is … an imperfect flag belonging to imperfect people living in an imperfect world.

Today is Flag Day. The flag will be on display on the front porch, just as always. At our house, every day is flag day.

We are not fair-weather flag folks. Old Glory is not relegated to a cameo appearance on Memorial Day and then banished to the hall closet after the Fourth of July. It is not saved for special holidays, provoking our patriotic duty to prominently feature it. We don’t roll it out like Christmas lights and Halloween pumpkins. We don’t view it as seasonal, like a Cherry Blossom wreath in the spring or a table setting at Thanksgiving.

The red, white and blue is a permanent reminder, a legacy of who we are and what we believe. We have watched history raise the flag at Iwo Jima, plant it next to a crater on the moon and hoist it in the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

My family has flown the American flag every day and everywhere we have lived for more than 30 years. We don’t flaunt it. We fly it.

When our flag begins to show the threadbare signs of old age, tattered and weathered by the elements, we dutifully replace it.

Granted, we could do a better job following proper flag etiquette. We have unintentionally allowed flags to touch the ground without thinking about the significance. We also don’t shine a spotlight on it at night, as protocol suggests. Apparently, porch lights don’t count.

But, because we fly it faithfully, maybe those transgressions can be forgiven.

Look around our city and you will notice flags everywhere – on office buildings, schools, gas stations, banks, insurance companies, funeral homes and car dealerships. In tree-lined neighborhoods, flags are mounted on porch railings and propped on mailboxes.

I remember when a flagpole was placed in front of The Telegraph’s old offices on Broadway the week after Sept. 11, 2001. I could look out my window on the second floor and draw inspiration. How could I not be moved by an American flag against the backdrop of Macon’s downtown skyline?

In recent years, I have watched from my classroom window at Stratford Academy and witnessed a daily ritual as old as chalkboards. Middle school students raise the flag up the flagpole every morning and respectfully bring it down after school.

It makes me smile to know the idea for an annual Flag Day was originated by a teacher. His name was Bernard Cigrand, and he taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Waubeka, Wisconsin, in the 1880s.

He encouraged his students to write an essay on what the flag meant to them. He then selected June 14 as “Flag Day” because, on that date in 1777, the Continental Congress passed a resolution that the U.S. flag should made up of “13 stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.’’

President Woodrow Wilson officially made June 14 “Flag Day” in 1916. Congress permanently established “National Flag Day” in 1949, when it was signed into law by President Harry Truman.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of when former Mayor Ronnie “Machine Gun” Thompson proclaimed Macon as “Flag City USA.’’ Thompson, who died this past March, showcased Poplar Street with 54 flagpoles stretched across three city blocks. The “Avenue of Flags” was dedicated on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 1970.

Our city no longer holds that distinction. The flags are long gone and it has been many years since we have touted ourselves as the Flag City.

But, in a flag-waving sense, the spirit never left.

I pray it never will.

Ed Grisamore teaches journalism at Stratford Academy in Macon. His column appears on Sundays in The Telegraph.