“What are you doing for the weekend?” I hear people asking. “Got plans?”
It’s Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend and everyone is getting ready for the big three-day holiday and the summer that follows. This is one of the days of the year when there is a kind of hum in the air; people are like racers revving their engines at the starting line of the Indy 500. Summer’s here but it’s finite. Let’s get this party started!
“How ’bout letting people out a little early since it’s Memorial Day?” someone suggests to me. “I bet you and Julee and Millie want to get on the road.”
Actually, no. I’ve been traveling a lot these past few weeks … Boston, Washington, Virginia. I’m in Akron for AA Founders Day in another week or so and then who knows where? So when Julee and I were talking about what to do this weekend, whether we’d drive up to the Berkshires or go visit some friends, an ancient gene or something kicked in.
“I just want to hang out around the apartment,” I said.
Yes, the ancient apartment-dwelling gene, woven into our genome back in the Pliocene Epoch by the need to call someplace home and be there.
Home can be a city, a town, a farm, a trailer. It can be a fifth-floor walkup or a ten-bedroom mansion. For most of us it’s something in between, a place we know with our hearts. For everyone, home is a feeling deep in the soul, a sense that you are where you were meant to be. Home is the place where God puts you, and you never doubt it when you’re there.
So this weekend I just want to hang around my home with Julee and Millie (maybe we’ll swing by and borrow Winky from hobbled Amy Wong and go to the dog park). I want to say hi to my neighbors, see if the Egyptian counterman at my corner deli passed his pharmacy exam, argue about the Yankees and the Mets with my newsstand guy, light a Memorial Day candle at the Church of St. Francis right down the street and maybe watch the sun set over the Hudson from one of the West Side piers. I want to stay close to where I belong, with the people (and dogs) that I love. I want to stay home, where I haven’t been enough lately.
What are you doing for inspiration (and fun) this Memorial Day weekend?
