The Story of the Three-Day Weekend

Highlands, NC
September 2, 2019

One advantage of spending three months as a shiftless unemployed ne’er-do-well bum is that you eventually don’t know or care what day of the week it is. 

Things must and do get done, but in general they can be completed on any day you prefer, in whatever order you choose.

Similarly, but for the opposite reason, most of mankind before last century shared this incomprehension of a “work week”. 

Perhaps excepting Sunday and religious feasts, they rose each morning before the sun, slipped on whatever they could rummage or classify as clothes or shoes, and trudged to their respective fields, factories, or mines. The days of the week were irrelevant, and generally indistinguishable from one another.

The notion of a two-day “weekend”, an eight-hour “workday”, or a one-week “vacation” would have been completely foreign to them. And, given their likely aversion to starving, more than a little ridiculous…even a bit abhorrent. The three-day weekend would have been insane, almost suicidal.

Their efforts, and especially the capital accumulation of those by whom they were employed or financed, is what allows us to now relax two days of every seven, and at least two weeks of every year.

The capitalist train to this liberating station was already well down the tracks by the time Progressive Era laws and unions jumped aboard, hijacked the engine, and claimed credit for the expanding luxury and leisure of the passengers.

Capital accumulation…not superfluous or retrograde legislation…is the key to labor productivity, to its remuneration, and to why we are able to honor it each year with this day of beaches, burgers, and beer. 

Or, in our case, of mountains lush with green, sky bright with blue, and wine and meat succulent in shades of white or red. We are celebrating Labor Day in the company of my parents, who have rented a home in beautiful western North Carolina. 

The air is cool, crisp, and comforting…almost beckoning to be breathed without the effort of inhaling. The scenery within the Highlands Falls community is captivating…even if it lacks the expansive, panoramic quality of many vistas in this area. 

But no matter. The company is wonderful, and the conversation terrific, supplemented by a couple hearty, delightful dinners. Over two nights dishes have labored under the weight of trout, swordfish, and grilled steak, while goblets groan like Coulee Dam against a perpetual flow of fine wine.

My mother, sons, and I played golf yesterday at Highlands Falls, with my younger boy lapping the field by a dozen strokes. That evening Jerry’s marvelous steak and several glasses of Peju and Canvasback cabernet dulled the memory of my poor round. 

Within three hours of Atlanta, this part of the state is also a favorite among Floridians…often called “half-backs” since many initially fled northern frosts for tropical heat, then ricocheted halfway back to escape the inhuman furnace of a Florida summer.

Situated 4,100 feet atop an Appalachian plateau, Highlands was named for obvious reasons, and ostensibly established as a trading post at the auspicious intersection of lines connecting Savannah to Chicago, and New Orleans to New York. 

The appellation, if not the aspiration, held up. The town is home to fewer than a thousand permanent residents, but supports over twenty thousand transient ones during the summer months.

We arrived later than planned Saturday afternoon, needing to first visit Rita’s father in the hospital before we left Atlanta. He was admitted Thursday to address suspected infections and actual breathing difficulties. 

Maladies afflict him at a clip that can make treating them seem a bit like carrying coal to Newcastle. But his mind is typically lucid and his spirits generally good. And the sight of his grandsons always brings a smile to his face. Bringing a smile to ours is the expectation that he will return home within a couple days.

These regular visits to the hospital remind us not only where my father-in-law is in his life, but where we are in ours. Whereas a couple decades ago hospital wards abounded in our contemporaries welcoming new children, today they are replete with friends sustaining aging parents.

A couple doors down the same hospital hall, the beloved father of our dear friend (and David’s godmother), Annie Antón, is receiving treatment for a collapsed lung. Several years older than Rita’s father, Annie’s has likewise suffered a deteriorating series of afflictions the last several years. 

The men have a few things in common aside from the address they share this weekend. Most notably, both raised wonderful, accomplished daughters, and spared them the tyranny of the oppressive regimes…one in Soviet Russia, the other in Castro’s Cuba…from which they successfully emigrated.

The current condition of these once vibrant men reinforces the stark validity of what Paul Newman once said: that, no matter what, no one gets out of life alive. 

We must therefore partake and share the joy of living it while we can. And I am grateful we are now able to do so..with my own family, in this wonderful place, and over a long weekend that is far too short.

JD