Please Vacate The Premises
WHEW! WE GOT THAT HOLIDAY OUT OF THE WAY. Of course, it’s going to be six months before all of the Yahoos in the neighborhood run out of the fireworks that they bought from our old pal “Three-Fingered Lucky.” Actually, it’s a bit of a race to see which disappears first – the fireworks or one of the eyes of the clown who got “beered up” and forgot to let go of the bottle rocket sputtering in his hand. My money is on the guy who owns the glass eye franchise in town.
Now that the “4th” is done with we don’t have any more holidays until Labor Day – you know – Labor Day, that day when everybody takes a day off from work. I’m retired so on Labor Day I’m tempted to go out and find a part time job. I’m just looking for some symmetry.
It used to be when I was a weak and callow youth that our Summer Vacation started on or about June 7th or 8th and lasted until the day after Labor Day. Now the kids might get sprung in late May, but they are back in the saddle in early August. Dang! That is just wrong!
These kids need a full Summer to learn how to get both pleasantly stupid and Poison Ivy. They need time to be kids. They are not corporate trainees on a coffee break.
Summer Vacation means just that: To Vacate. To get away from classrooms and teachers and to pile the family into the Minivan and vacate the rut they are in and to which they will return. Vacate the mindset that everything revolves around finding “E” using that mysterious equation.
It is my theory that kids who don’t have enough free time to get in trouble with the neighbors and pick up a few stitches along the way grow up to be covered in bad tattoos and think that the world has to play by their rules. You know – the real SOBs who block your driveway with their motorcycles and equate Pit Bulls with gonads.
Holidays come and holidays go. It is a calendar of its own. Days marked in red that are there to commemorate a certain event or person, most of which or whom are in our dim and dismal past. It doesn’t take long for the reason for the celebration to fade as well eventually turning into just another three day weekend. After a generation or two no one has a personal memory of the who or why and the stories become more and more apocryphal and harder to believe. Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree? Did he really throw a coin across the Potomac or the Delaware, or the Hudson or whatever river? If he did all he was doing was wasting his money. I hope he made a wish.
We are well into Summertime, my personal favorite time of year. It is that time when my body has the least to complain about. Not like Winter whey my carcass does nothing but whine, moan, and remind me that I’m older than I was yesterday.
July 4th – the day that we should celebrate with fireworks and the reading of our founding documents was yesterday. Today, however, is the next day, the “morning after” if you will. This is just one Summer day among many. Enjoy it. Let the kids run, yell, and scrape a knee. They’ll thank you for it someday when they think back on the Summer Days of their youth and watch their own kids building memories.
Down the Hall on Your Left 