Labor Day

Labor Day seemed to creep up on me this year. Although I am steadfast in observing my daily calendar, I am not always thinking ahead. Maybe it is because the highlight for me occurred midweek before the holiday weekend. On our drive home from Maine, Patti and I took a detour to see Thoreau’s “camp” on Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., followed by a stop at the North Bridge, site of the 1775 Battle of Concord, which Thoreau memorialized in his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In it, he contrasts the peace he felt on the river with its violent past.

By Friday afternoon, back in East Hampton, I found myself in an empty office—staff left early to avoid the traffic--with a few late client appointments. It was anticlimactic. After the weekend, all the hot air and high energy that had built up before Labor Day had abruptly vaporized, gone with all the summer crowds.

So be it… In years past, at Ben Franklin High School in Rochester, New York, classes would have just started after Labor Day, and I was finally unshackled from my full-time summer duties at Dad’s parking lot on Stilson Street. I continued to work weekends, but only when the weather was nice. Mom wouldn’t let him take me to work when it rained or snowed for fear of me catching something, since I was “sickly,” or so she said. On Saturday of Labor Day weekend in 1957, before my senior year in high school, I went early to the lot in Dad’s WWII Jeep with the permanently attached snowplow. There were only a few customers in the parking lot--stragglers visiting their offices and one or two shoppers going to browse the bookshelves at Scrantom’s on Main Street. Dad let me go after the Saturday morning minyan prayer service at Temple Birth Kodesh, and the last congregants had returned to their cars to head home for lunch. I was off to meet the guys at Charlotte Beach, a popular park where the Genesee River meets Lake Ontario. The weather was still warm and the sand and water inviting.

On Sunday, I was up early again for work, now to take payments from the smartly dressed crowd coming out of the church after Sunday mass. Then I was off again to the beach, specifically the picnic area, for kosher hot dogs, a Coke, corn on the cob roasted on the grill, and a piece of watermelon, all for 25 cents. At the end of the day, I treated myself to an Abbott’s frozen custard. Labor Day itself was a bust. Not much to do except anticipate the next year of high school: university entrance exams and the competition to be accepted at a college that someone in my gang had previously heard of. Senior year proved to be a bit stressful despite the fact that it was supposed to be the “best” year of our young lives. What B.S. Other than Senior Play and my supporting role in it, evening driving privileges, and dating Judie, high school was a black cloud. In the end, it was worth it. I left for Rutgers College in New Jersey the following August for a new life, new friends, and a future, much of which was founded on my years in New Brunswick for undergrad and law school. It really did not matter where I went to college, but what I did with the time spent there. I studied hard, had a wonderful fraternity experience, and met a smart and loyal group of friends with whom I still get together and talk regularly, as I do with many of my high school buddies. I find a quiet Labor Day like the one I had this year an ideal opportunity to reflect on those calendar milestones of years past.