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Last week on this page we ran a column by Andy Rooney that talked about Labor Day — “No period divides our year more definitely than the end of August and the beginning of September,” he wrote. “Labor Day is the beginning of some things but the end of others.”
How true, I thought.
It was always associated, of course, with the end of summer and the beginning of school, an event few, if any, kids relished. That was when school started after Labor Day; I am still struggling each year with the fact that by Labor Day we have three football games under our belts and are well into the school year.
These days, the holiday weekend still marks the unofficial end of summer. Since summer is still my favorite season of the year, it’s not much to celebrate. And I’ve only heightened the melancholy-ness of Labor Day weekend by constantly procrastinating certain tasks all summer long.
“I’ll take care of that after Labor Day,” I tell myself as I head for the golf course or put something aside on my desk. So now I have a “to-do list” at home and a stack of projects at work that make me long for the lost days of summer.
We all have our holiday routines; events and traditions that become so closely associated with the closing weekend of summer that if we didn’t do them, it just wouldn’t feel right. For many, it’s a last weekend fling at the lake, perhaps an annual a trip to the Auburn festival, or a family reunion picnic.
I heard a brief news analysis by a television political correspondent over the recent weekend that referred to Labor Day weekend as the traditional kick-off of the election season. That benchmark, he noted of course, has been obliterated by the early onslaught of presidential campaign activities that began shortly after the new year. The election is still 14 months away and there are already signs of voter fatigue.
But hey, Labor Day doesn’t have a totally negative connotation. The wife and I realized a few weeks ago that we were approaching the 40th anniversary of our first date: a trip to the Indiana State Fair on Labor Day, 1967.
While that holiday marked the end of another summer before another year in high school, it was also the beginning of something pretty good.
by MARK MILLER
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