Labor Day

Labor Day weekend and here I am, just like on any other Sunday in the year, waiting around for some sports activity to come on the tube. The Diamondbacks play the Giants early this afternoon, but their season is as good as over. They’re too far back of the Dreadful Dodgers to catch them in the last thirty games. But I’ve invested my time in watching them for the first 130 games, so I feel obligated to finish the season with them. And, thankfully, the NFL won’t begin until next weekend. I say “thankfully” because I won’t have to suffer through a Cardinals game today. I say “suffer through” because that’s what I do every year, suffer through the Cardinals’ all too frequent losses. My salvation today will be the third round coverage of the Deutsche Bank golf tournament, the second in the lineup of tournaments leading to the FedEx finals. And Tiger is prowling, so he’ll be fun to watch. And Phil is doing his Phil thing, hitting some just disastrous shots and then recovering in magical, mystical Phil ways.

Then there’s Labor Day tomorrow, my bench mark in the past for the start of another school year. Oh, the pain of that annual beginning. The end of a teacher’s freedom, the anxiety of seeing classloads of new faces, planning new units to teach to mostly unresponsive students. The twenty percent that have always been there and always will be brightened my teaching career, but the other eighty percent finally drove me out of the classroom. I always swore I’d teach into my seventies, but the apathy I confronted during the last ten years made me rethink that retirement date. Other than school start, what does Labor Day mean to me? Summer’s end. A parade or two on tv, a family get-together for a Labor Day meal. That’s about it. Labor Day is my least favorite national holiday. Labor Day, a day to celebrate the working class. Sounds sort of uniony to me. But then, I was part of the New York State Teachers Association, so I can’t really grump about unions. Grover Cleveland signed this day into law in 1894 after a number of demonstrators were killed as they complained of unfair railroad wages in the Pullman Strike. And now, 119 years later, we’re still taking a day off from work to recognize all the laborers in the country. As a happy retiree, I’m no longer a part of that laboring group. But at 4:00 this afternoon, cocktail time, I’ll raise a Scotch and water, toasting all the laborers lucky enough to have jobs, commiserating with all those who don’t.