This is the weekend when we allow ourselves an extra day to pause and take a deep breath before heading into the burst of heat and activity that attends New England summers. The three days of Memorial Day weekend tick off like Ready, Set, Go for the summer season, when we don’t stop running until we secure ourselves good curbside seats for the Labor Day Parade. Released into the great outdoors by a sun that comes early and stays late, we feel free to do almost anything and often end up trying to do almost everything.

As Americans, we view all this freedom as a birthright. A quick look around the world, however, shows us that large populations still live under regimes where people do not have the freedom to speak their minds, to travel where they wish, or to criticize their own governments without putting their lives in peril. So it is appropriate in this pause before a free and easy summer season that Memorial Day directs our attention those for whom freedom was not easy.

While we think of freedom and democracy as the cornerstones of this American society, the foundation they sit on was built in the chaos of brutal violence. People died laying these cornerstones. The US Department of Defense enumerates the battle deaths: the Revolutionary War, 4,435; the Civil War, 214,938; World War I, 53,513; World War II, 292,131; Korean War, 33,651; Vietnam War, 47,369. That is a lot of carnage in defense of an idea. Think of how any death tears at a family, and then think of the impact of a death, usually of a young person, multiplied hundreds of thousands of times, generation after generation. It is no mistake, when we refer to Old Glory, that the red comes before the white and blue. Whatever glory we have as a nation was paid for in blood.

As we head out this Memorial Day weekend in our t-shirts and tank tops, we may be so eager to get started on the fun that we skip over the formal Memorial Day observances. (“Memorial Day, oh yeah, whatever…”) But taking a moment to meditate on the sacrifice of others on our behalf may be the single most important thing we can do for our children and ourselves this weekend. The American Legion Post 202 will conduct its Memorial Day ceremonies at 10 am on Saturday, May 27 at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at the intersection of Main Street and Hanover Road. First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal and State Rep Julia Wasserman are scheduled to speak at the event, which will last approximately 30 minutes. If it is quality time you are looking for this weekend, you will not be able to top these 30 minutes.