Love’s Labor Day lost…
(Yes, I do, occasionally, take time off. And Labor Day is typically one of those days, even in these post-Covid times. So I’m re-running a Labor Day missive from years past that I hope you’ll enjoy. Stay safe, y’all, and we’ll see you on the other side.)
My, how times have changed. Labor Day just isn’t what it used to be.
Around my household, the first major sign of the long weekend when summer closed out was, without a doubt, the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, which my mother adored watching.
Oh, and we watched it on a TV that wasn’t a flat board with a picture, but served as a piece of furniture and the central focus of the living room.
Labor Day also meant we’d be going back to school on Tuesday (none of this mid-August stuff) and if summer’s heat was still pounding a bit, we also knew that it would be a more than a little tepid in those classrooms, since schools in this part of the country weren’t air conditioned (about the only places with cool air then were movie theaters and department stores).
It might be a day for one last cookout if Daddy wasn’t having to work (police officers, hospital workers, firefighters and medics were about the only folks for whom there were no holidays) and, if we were lucky, my mother would whip up her unbelievable German chocolate cake (from scratch, baby) to treat her kids – though, in retrospect, it was likely a bit of a celebration for her since our ‘gang of six’ would all be off to school and she’d actually have a little down time on weekdays.
There were a few small festivals around, but none of us kids were really interested in those since we knew that, in a short while, the county fair was coming and it’d be a whole lot more fun.
Teenagers (yes, they were once called that) fortunate enough to spend Labor Day weekend at the beach would be on their way home, and if anything happened along the way, like a flat tire or some such, they’d have to scramble to find a pay phone to call home. (To most of today’s under-40 crowd: no, that’s not an app, that’s an actual telephone, in a booth or on a wall, into which you had to insert coins before dialing.)
Going shopping on Labor Day was nonexistent, since before stores went from mom ‘n pop to money-grubbing corporate entities they actually closed all day on holidays and people stayed home and enjoyed the company of friends and family.
Parades were around, but they were few and far between in the South where ‘labor union’ wasn’t part of the vernacular, and – hereabouts at least – the single largest group event was probably the Southern 500 race in Darlington, which you’d have to follow on the radio because ESPN, if spoken aloud back then, sounded like you were referring to a fortune teller at the aforementioned county fair.
We kids would have to sit around and listen to our parents talk about the ‘good old days’ because we didn’t have earbuds or streamed whatever, and a few would surreptitiously roll their eyes as tales of yore were shared (but you’d better not let Daddy see you doing that).
And now, seemingly suddenly, it’s our turn to reminisce.
Ah, love’s Labor Day lost.
You’d give anything to be able to bring it back, wouldn’t you?
A FedEx footnote
Congratulations to Scottie Scheffler, now the undisputed absolute best golfer in the world.
He hoisted the FedEx Cup yesterday as the 2024 Tour Champion, but not before he kissed his wife, hugged his parents and lifted up his new son Bennett after a four-stroke win of the PGA’s season-ending championship in Atlanta.
The victory was his eighth of a year in which he won the Masters, the Players Championship and, oh, yeah, the Olympic Gold Medal in France.
No one else has had a year like this one since Tiger Woods performed similar magic 18 years ago.
Scheffler will lead the American squad in a couple of weeks at the Presidents Cup tourney in Canada, so we won’t have to wait all that long to see his continuing magic on the links.