Labor Day

“I don’t think this is what they mean by Labor Day,” my husband groaned as we hauled a rock maple highboy dresser up a steep staircase into our bedroom.

I remembered a Labor Day weekend 22 years ago when contractions alarmed me two weeks ahead of schedule. It was our first child, our son, wanting to be part of the picnic we celebrated every year with our bungalow friends.

Full labor didn’t develop that day. Our son dallied in utero for almost a month before being pulled unwillingly into the antiseptic world of a hospital.

While I waited for him, I nested fervently. My mother painted a second-hand dresser while I fashioned a tumbling-blocks quilt. My husband assembled a crib from Sears.

go to column

“Please, sir, may I have some more cheese?”

Although Labor Day is commonly thought of as the “end of the season” here in the Catskills, it is by no means the end of a full roster of events to attend throughout the rest of the year. Just because the bungalows close down and the leaves begin to turn is no reason to think that artists stop creating, that musicians stop playing, or that actors all fly south for the winter.

go to column

The plight of Mortal Americans

The health care debate, when you get right down to it, is about something much deeper than even an MRI scan. It is about the fate of a long-neglected and severely oppressed segment of American society. This group—I can’t say “minority,” really—has been so thoroughly oppressed that many of those who do in fact belong to it strive with every fiber of their being to deny their membership, not only to others but to themselves as well.

I am, of course, speaking of “Mortal Americans.”

Upon reading that phrase, you may have experienced a brief moment of self-recognition, followed by the thought, “Why, no, he can’t possibly be talking about me.”

go to column