The One True National Holiday: Sunday musings…2/17/2024
1 Upstander. Better than bystander.
2 Tare. To zero a measuring instrument. I was today year’s old when I learned this.
3 Patrick Adams. While flying home from a meeting I struck up a conversation with my row mate (I routinely talk to strangers), a gentleman named Patrick Adams. Seems Mr. Adams is semi-famous in the general way, but rather genuinely famous among the music cognoscenti of Nashville where he is a songwriter and performer. We shared the last leg of his trip home from performing.
Do yourself a favor, look this guy up on Spotify or wherever you do such things. Listen to his lyrics. Maybe choose, as I did, a playlist of others playing music he wrote. Think of it as talking to strangers by proxy.
4 Book Report. “We get given our faces, but we inherit our lives.” Michael Robotham, “Life or Death”.
Often, when I finish a book, something that happens with some frequency I’m glad to say, I think that perhaps I should have a little space in “Sunday musings…” or “Random Thoughts” that serves as a kind of book report. I dunno, might be a bit presumptuous but when has that ever stopped me, eh? Anyway, a fair portion of what shows up here comes from stuff I’ve read, including the above-mentioned “Life or Death.” It’s a fantastic story, a thriller, and honestly I just couldn’t put it down. A guy has spent 10 years in prison and on the day before he is scheduled to be released at the end of his sentence he escapes from prison.
It’s a story about fortitude. About single-mindedly doing the right thing, no matter how often or how violently you are thwarted. Asked about the wild swings of luck he experiences the hero answers with a bit of southwestern poetry: “I guess I broke a mirror and found a horseshoe on the same day.” While not as filled with the invitation to deepest thinking I enjoyed in “Dark Matter”, it is nonetheless one of the better reads of the 20’s.
5 Holiday. The one, true universal holiday in the United States is Super Bowl Sunday (SBS). Seriously. Is there truly another day in which a super majority of our nation’s citizens unite more completely, with a greater cross-section of the population engaged than the championship game of the National Football League? Seriously. It supersedes Christmas, New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July (which I’ll bet most people do not know is really called Independence Day) for participation. Some 130 million folks tuned in to watch it live, if only to see the commercials (at $7 Million for 30 seconds) they would talk about even more than the game itself.
Some folks tuned in solely for the commercials, using the action in the game as a bathroom break.
“Did you see The Game?” “Where did you watch The Game?” “How about that commercial for XYZ? Wasn’t it awesome/awful?” For days on end both pre- and post-SBS these questions were never more than 30 seconds in to any conversation in my decidedly middle-class world. Man or woman, young or old. Didn’t matter. I’m still processing what it means for such an event to be the singular thing on which a country agrees. It doesn’t matter which team you rooted for, or this year if you were rooting for a team at all.
You know EXACTLY what I’m referring to.
What really struck me, convincing me that SBS is, indeed, that one single universal commonality was reading a couple of newspapers and watching the network morning shows on Monday (I was on vacation, chilling with Beth and Hero as they trained in a more horse friendly clime than Cleveburg in February). The topic at hand was whether the Monday following SBS should be a national holiday. Really. Folks were having serious conversations about whether the nation should cure SBS flu by simply declaring the day a holiday. In a country that can’t somehow find a way to make Election Day a national holiday, shutting down on the Monday after SBS was fodder for serious discussion.
I found myself counting up the national holidays we do have. Days when schools, government offices and the financial markets are closed. Heck, maybe we even celebrate some of them. Christmas and Thanksgiving. New Year’s Day. Independence Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Veteran’s Day, President’s Day and MLK Day. Did you know that VE Day (Victory in Europe) and VJ Day (Victory over Japan) were once national holidays? No one remembers VE Day, and Rhode Island is the only VJ holdout remaining. Where once we lived under the umbrella of “Blue Laws” that forbade commerce on Sundays, you can now buy a sofa on Easter.
Do we need another national holiday? Beats me. Looking at our list of holidays we have now they all seem to have, I dunno, maybe a tiny bit of nobility, or something to that tune. Maybe that’s a stretch, the nobility part. I guess I’m thinking that collapsing Washington and Lincolns’ birthday celebrations into a single day while adding MLK Day contains at least a whiff of nobility, no? Anyway, the days we DO have all seem to be backed by long-standing, almost eternal significance (looking at you, New Year’s Day), national impact, or the like.
Like Easter, Super Bowl Sunday does not require that we set aside a day off work for the celebration. Is SBS itself a holiday? Sure. Any day that brings together almost half of the country is some way, shape, or form fits the definition, at least my version of the definition. Indeed, Super Bowl Sunday and all that goes along with it may be the single thing that we can all agree on. That we can all congregate around without major conflict or controversy. Those who celebrate the day pretty much have a live and let live attitude toward those who don’t and vice versa, and really, how many things in our modern America can you say THAT about.
As I talk myself through this I think I’m cool with Super Bowl Sunday as quasi-national holiday. But the Monday after? Nah. Not buying it. In a country that de-holidayed the day commemorating Columbus and the “first” Europeans to set foot in the Western Hemisphere we’re gonna shut down City Hall, local schools and the nation’s banking system so that SBS “celebrants” can suffer their hangovers at home? I’m afraid that I just can’t find the nobility, reverence, historical or civic significance, necessary to make that call.
I’m willing to keep an open mind, though. I mean, if a certain guy had dropped to one knee and you-know-who said “yes”, well, maybe just that once.
I’ll see you next week…
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