Labor Day

Labor Day.

I rented Picnic (1955, Dir. Joshua Logan) as I’m wont to do, a tradition of mine.

The homesickness is surfacing again, along with the subtle resentment that I’m forced to get off property at some point. Something I’m loathe to do with my very meager bank account.

As an introvert, I take great umbrage with having to move my station especially in a world where third places are increasingly dwindling in favor of places where money must be spent for a false sense of liberty. Most of those places tend to push vices on you as well, and being in recovery, I don’t take kindly to either tine of the fork being pierced through me while I watch the slow and very real collapse of Western Civilization in real time with billionaires who have more than enough money for a lifetime.

No, I no longer consider myself a Taylor Swift fan, for very obvious reasons. There are no ethical billionaires.

Labor Day is a day meant for leisure. My idea of leisure includes the faint memory of a day spent where my father and mother smoked a pork shoulder over applewood pellets and the balmy humidity of September sank into the leaves of the oak trees that lined our streets with droplets of precipitation. It does not include aimlessly wandering down the Dixie Highway into businesses that are closed today due to the obvious fact that it’s a holiday.

I don’t know how I’ll get to Boca Raton tomorrow with the meager sums in my bank account, that is, unless my father allows me his credit card information so I can bum a ride there. Which I may have to do.

Robert Altman has a special series dedicated to him on the Criterion Channel this month. Perhaps I can finally catch a viewing of Nashville and rewatch 3 Women. I can watch Popeye, too. I do love Shelley Duvall.

It’s such an arbitrary thing, this getting off property. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just loathsome the idea that it’s expected of me. I get very ornery about things being expected of me.

I miss those long ago memories of the smell of smoked applewood pellets and the juices of a pork being slowly smoked over them. The sweet acidity of my mother’s coleslaw dressing as she drizzled it over the shredded cabbage leaves and peeled carrots. The corn sweat as we peeled the husks with their silk that would stick to the inside of my thighs as we sat on the bottom cement step that leads to the cobblestoned patio. The lingering scent of chlorine in the air from the pool. The dust as it settled on the wrought iron fence.

I’d give anything to go back to that day.