By John Toth
The Bulletin
Labor Day weekend has always signaled the end of “what day is this, anyway?”
The following Tuesday, I would be sitting in a classroom, attending the first day of school. But at least there was one last three-day summer weekend.
I returned from my summer job in the scenic countryside to the big city a couple of weeks earlier. Back in those days, I had to register for college classes in person. We didn’t have online registration. As a matter of fact, we didn’t have online anything.
I was feeling melancholy. I knew that I had to get back to the real world. No career was ever made by waltzing through summer breaks, day after day, not caring about what day it was, only that I still had plenty of time before summer was over.
As those days dwindled, though, reality crept closer, until I got on the bus and train and returned to the real world of tasks and responsibilities.
And then came Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer.
The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon was on TV. I checked it periodically to see what the total was. Every year, it seemed, they set a new record, and Lewis looked totally beat at the end after staying up all night and day. Lewis did the telethon from 1966 to 2011. I wasn’t here for the 1966 one, but I think I watched part of it from 1967 on.
I couldn’t watch it for too long. The telethon was one of the reminders that harder days were ahead... I really hated to see summer come to an end. It has always been my favorite season of the year, even when I lived in a climate that had four seasons.
I probably appreciated summer more then, because it lasted only for three months, not like here along the Texas Gulf Coast, where there is summer, and then there is almost summer.
I can take the heat better than the cold. Before and after summer in a four-season climate, it is cool, cold, then very cold for a long time. Those cold months were my least favorite of the year.
I tried to extend summer and ward off Labor Day Weekend by staying at my summer job longer. I volunteered each year to help close up the summer camp I worked at. The extra money wasn’t that much, but I didn’t have to worry about the end of summer for a couple of more weeks.
Eventually, that trick didn’t work very well, because Labor Day weekend approached, anyway.
As the hours ticked away on those Labor Day Mondays, I started to realize that I was not that good in transitioning from summer to anything else.
Jerry Lewis finished his telethon; the 6 o’clock news reported that he set a new pledge record. I tuned in to the late-night news, where they repeated it, because there wasn’t a whole lot of news to report that day.
Classes started the next morning. Professors tried to prepare us for what was to come, while I was mentally still floating in the lake during my days off and hitchhiking to the convenience store down the road.
I was living a dream that I could not have planned out better in the 1970s.
The first day of classes were throw-aways. Things got busier quickly, and after a couple of days, I was actually looking forward to another couple of semesters of higher education. That included, among other things, our breakfast club, pinball tournaments, hanging out in the student lounge, meeting some great people, parties and yes, learning. That was the most important part, although not as much fun as playing pool on campus with friends.
I made enough money during the summer that I didn’t worry much about having to work during the semester, although I would have liked to have had one of those cushy jobs at the college bookstore. There were no openings - ever.
Have a great Labor Day weekend, dear readers.
While schools are now open, living along the Texas Gulf Coast means that summer is really not over. It’s a frame of mind.
I think those of us who stay in summer mode live longer.
It’s a feeling I have found difficult to give up - a feeling that summer never ends.
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