Holiday may just signify our freedom from work

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 4, 2000

Today is Independence Day.

It is the Fourth of July.

Sunday, when some chose to observe the holiday, was the Second of July. Not the Fourth. This Friday, when others will choose to observe the birth of a nation, will be the Seventh.

Today, if you are inclined to get drunk, operate boats and motor vehicles unsafely and set off quasi-legal explosives in your back yard, is the correct day to recall the signing of the Declaration of Independence and commemorate the courage and forethought of the individuals involved. (Forethought? Of course. Later, in writing another document, they would, with just one tiny amendment about bearing arms, manage to ensure that hack out-of-work actors still would have both an income and a pulpit a mere 224 years later.)

Having holidays in the middle of the week didn't used to be such a big deal. We always just sort of observed them as they fell and counted ourselves lucky when happenstance provided us with an extended weekend.

That, of course, failed to figure in the influence of retail sales outlets that always are willing to have a sale at the drop of a hat. (In fact, they will usually drop their hats a lot farther and a lot faster than their prices.)

I guess the concept is that people with three days to celebrate will spend at least one of them shopping.

And, of course, there were organized-labor folks who managed to see to it that Labor Day, and later other observances, would take place on Monday.

I, for one, never have minded having a holiday or a day off in the middle of the week.

I worked for four years at one job where I had to work Saturdays and take Thursdays off, meaning I didn't have one complete weekend off, except during vacations, for four years.

So I adjusted to being on my own on Thursdays.

It meant the woman to whom I was then married was at work, so there was no one at home to call attention to my numerous shortcomings in the areas of lawn maintenance, automobile washing and odd jobs around the house.

Malls, stores and parks were all but empty. Traffic was nil. You could go to a swimming hole (the Illinois equivalent of beaches) without having to elbow your way through beer-swilling morons (okay, other beer-swilling morons) to find enough square footage to put down your blanket and cooler.

And I can't help it: I always took a fiendish pleasure in knowing that while I was doing nothing, most of the rest of the world was slaving away.

There are those who would be so unkind as to opine that I still take said pleasure and that I take it a lot more often than one day a week, but that's another subject for another time.

The concept of a five-day, 40-hour, stress-filled work week is not worldwide. Many Latin American nations enjoy the entirely civilized concept of the siesta, an afternoon nap that made even more sense before air conditioning than it does now.

In European nations you seldom run into the concept of cocktail lounges holding Happy Hours, inviting one to depressurize every afternoon after a long day of plotting ways to subvert the boss, Blue Mondays for those who haven't quite adjusted yet to the passage of the weekend; Hump Days, observing Wednesday's passing as the midpoint in the work week and TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) parties celebrating the arrival of another weekend.

For a culture that is supposedly dominated by a Puritan work ethic, we spend an awful lot of time honoring work more in the breach than the observance, and in ways of which our uptight, scarlet-letter-waving ancestors would have disapproved.

So, if you are one of those who actually are observing Independence Day today, revel in it. Wallow in the joys of it being Tuesday. When you get back to work tomorrow you will be facing only a three-day work week before another glorious weekend.

By the way, I checked. The Declaration of Independence was signed on a Thursday.

There is no historical indication whether the boys stretched it into a four-day weekend . . . but I hear the resultant fireworks were something to see.

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