We had been driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco when I noticed the flags. They were everywhere, on top of the silvery tall buildings, on top of the squat red-brown ones, even on some places that seemed too precarious to fly a flag. They all unfurled themselves halfway down the flagpole, making the air around them gray with the electricity of the unusual.
I asked my mom why they were like that. I don’t recall her exact words, but in my memory the answer was this: Because something terrible has happened, and the whole country is in mourning.
The way the idea of this weighed on me, the way I remember the flags with too much air above them, how this empty air almost hummed with grief—it all makes me think that I was very young, more able to feel than speak. But it’s possible the flags I saw had been lowered for the explosion of the Challenger, in 1986, when I was 10.
Still, for years I carried that same dread with me whenever I saw a lowered flag. I could somehow take on the sadness of it, and in turn, believe that whatever caused the tragedy was something people were going to do everything they could to prevent in the future.
Now I go past the flag at our local fire station several times a day: taking kids to school, running errands, picking the kids up again. In the last year—particularly in the last few months—it seems that the flag is never at the top of the flagpole. Whether it drifts or snaps in the breeze, it’s always at half-staff.
I realized that I didn’t know much about when and why the flag is lowered—and who’s in charge of deciding how it flies. There are many guidelines surrounding the American flag, and when it’s flown at half-staff. The President can order the flag to be flown at half-staff to mourn the deaths of U.S. and state government figures, dignitaries, and others “as a tribute to their service to the United States,” the guidelines say. State governors can also issue instructions about flying the flag at half-staff; they often do so if a law enforcement officer or firefighter has died in the line of duty. Universities and other institutions often ask for a lowering of the flags, too. Wherever the half-staff flag flies, according to a UK guide to flag protocol, it is making room for the invisible flag of death.
The President has been issuing a lot of orders about the flag this fall. But my kids haven’t noticed the flag, even though they pass by it at least twice a day, and often more. Half-staff, to them, may seem like the way a flag is supposed to fly.
Maybe it’s starting to seem normal to me, too, and that’s what I’m most sorry about. When I went by the fire station earlier this week, the flag dangled from the middle of the pole. I turned up the Christmas carols on the radio and kept driving.
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Image by Scott via Flickr/Creative Commons license