Of Rocks and Holidays

It has been a quiet week.

REALLY quiet.

Sometimes, some of fromour family and friends forget that we don’t really know what’s going on with them. We go for weeks without an email or a phone call from many of them, and the little trails of our lives diverge that much further.

It’s a subtle slippage that doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal — we’ve been on the road, they’ve been to birthday parties, become engaged, bought a new car, started a new job. We’ve seen the countryside, become acquainted with people from another part of the state, vowed never to travel with other people’s children again, and taken lots of pictures. It’s communication, of a sort. We get the highlights, by word of mouth, “he said, she said,” bits of email, news, in fractions, days later.

All in all, nothing much has happened in the past little while. But “nothing much” shared is sometimes what makes a family, and that “nothing” can turn out to be a wedge that pushes into the miles between us, and makes us more absent from one another.

It’s odd how we move along like ants — heads down, antennae busily twitching — consumed with the minutiae of our mundaneness. Seeing a woman pull up her shirt in the produce section to show off her belly button ring to an admiring — or dubious — audience is a quick snicker that one doesn’t remember to mention, days later. A sentence the baby said — while one might have been excited about it at the time — one can’t quite recall when asked.

This is the way a rock erodes, one particle of grit washed away at a time, then suddenly — it seems so sudden — the rock is gone, and there is nowhere to prop a friendly elbow, and nothing against which to lean. And when tragedy strikes, these are the things that ricochet through our minds — this is the language of “if only.”

Erosion. A melancholy thought, which urges us to put pen to paper and try to hold on to myriad friends who are far away…

Monday is “a Bank Holiday.” We’re always amused when we’re advised of these days, because twice D. has been prepared to go to work or school, only to find that no one else was there, or expecting to do anything. “Bank” holidays never seem to have any thing associated with them. In November, there was St. Andrews Day… we did find that one to make sense, since we were offered a jaunt to St. Andrews to see the festivities honoring an actual person. But we’ve never been given any explanation for the other random holidays which dot the Glaswegian calendar, and we had to ask, a bit shamefacedly, whether or not that meant the mail was going to arrive. (It won’t.)

It may be that Scottish people know exactly what each and every “bank” holiday is for, and, like Americans, can say, “Oh, of course. It’s President’s Day, which combines Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays, there’s no school, and the post office is closed.” or “It’s the Queen’s Jubilee, which… celebrates… er… the Queen. And her Jubilee. But the shops are open.” As a matter of fact, we can be quite sure that most Scots know exactly why only a skeleton crew is going to be at work this next Monday. Only, most of them probably don’t care. It’s a work-free day, for goodness sakes. Don’t question it!

All right, all right. So, we won’t rock the boat, but we did make a few discreet inquiries and have determined that a.) bank holidays are only a name people give for taking a day off. According to our sources, there are only seven actual official public Scottish holidays, and these include:

• New Year’s Day, if it be not a Sunday or, if it be a Sunday, 3rd January
• 2 January, if it be not a Sunday or, if it be a Sunday, 3rd January
• Good Friday
• The first Monday in May
• The first Monday in August
• Christmas Day, if it be not a Sunday or, if it be a Sunday, 26th December
• St Andrew’s Day (30 November), or the following Monday should November 30 fall on a weekend

Right.

So. A Monday in the middle of July? Is not a ‘Bank’ holiday, per se, but a little more digging uncovered that this Monday is still an ‘official’ holiday in Glasgow. This weekned kicks off an eight-day celebration known as the Glasgow Fayre (Fair). Apparently since Victorian times, the Fayre has been a major Glaswegian event – the wealthier folk went down to the “watter” and celebrated in holiday towns on the Firth of Clyde, while the working class folk flocked to the Green for basically a major street fair. It’s going to be a disappointment to many that the rain will continue unabated throughout the long weekend — but the official reason for the fair, we were told, is to celebrate “the close of summer.”

Well, since it’s rained for days on end, it doesn’t feel like summer has ever truly begun, but we don’t honestly mind. Any excuse to stay home and do the last bits of unpacking, and wrestling the house into submission we’ll take gladly!

– D & T

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