Three O’Clock

Cedar Valley News
May 25, 2026
Three O’Clock
By Teresa Nikas

At three o’clock this afternoon, almost nobody in this country will pause. The country has forgotten the minute is there.

Cedar Valley News, as best I can tell, may be the only paper in America reminding its readers today. We are doing it on purpose. A small paper in a small valley cannot do much about the wars the country fights or about the funerals other towns are holding. But we can remind a town of what the country has agreed to remember. A paper unwilling to do the small thing within its reach has stopped earning its name.

This is the National Moment of Remembrance. Congress established it in two thousand. It asks every American to pause one minute, at three p.m. local time, on the last Monday in May, to honor those who died in service to this country. Twenty-six years on, almost no paper will print a word about it. The minute went on the books, and the books have not made it into most lives.

So here is the reminder, in plain language, on Memorial Day morning, while you have time to act on it.

At three o’clock this afternoon, stop. Sixty seconds. Wherever you are. If you are at a barbecue, set down the tongs. If you are driving, pull over if you can. If you are at the lake, stop the boat and let it drift. If you are on the porch with your family, like I will be, do not make a speech of it. Just say it is three o’clock, and ask the people you love to be quiet with you for one minute.

I am going to make a big deal of it on my own porch. I am going to tell my sister and her husband at breakfast. I am going to tell my nephew, who is eight years old, the same age I was when I first noticed my grandfather walking out at quarter to three. My grandfather was a veteran of a war I will not name, because the war is not the point. He came home in 1946 and lived 43 more years and did not, in all I knew of him, give a single speech about what he had seen. Every Memorial Day until the year he died, he stepped onto his back porch at quarter to three, sat in a wooden chair he had built himself, and waited. At three, he took his hat off and held it on his knee. At one minute past, he put it back on and went inside.

I asked my mother once what he was doing out there. She said he was visiting some friends. I said where are they. She said they could not come to the house.

I understood eventually. The chair is on my porch now, the wood darker than it was, the cushions newer than the rest. I am going to tell my nephew today what my mother told me. He is old enough now to understand a part of it. At quarter to three, I will walk out to the back porch and sit in my grandfather’s chair. My family will follow me. We will be quiet together at three. At one minute past, we will go back to the lemonade and the grill. We will have done the thing the country asked us to do.

One other thing, because Memorial Day and Veterans Day are not the same, and the country keeps confusing them. Today is for the ones who did not come home. November is for the ones who did. If you have a living veteran at the table today, thank him if you want to, but he is not the subject. The subject is the friends he carried home in his head, the empty chairs at the company reunion every year, the men and women whose graves the volunteers marked with flags last weekend.

Set your phone for two fifty-nine. Whatever you are doing, stop at three. Make a small thing of it with the people you are with. Tell them where the minute came from. Tell them why we have it.

Let Cedar Valley be the town which did.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us what you did at three o’clock. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Memorial Day, the National Moment of Remembrance, and the Act of Congress establishing it in 2000 are real.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.