Labor Day is over and with it, so are the
ninety days we spend every year pretending summer might last forever.
The coolers get emptied, and the beach
chairs go back into the garage. Somewhere a swimming pool is being covered. The
mums are replacing the tired flowers on the porch, and the baseball season
begins handing the calendar over to football.
There is one thing I still miss every
Labor Day weekend. The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon.
If you are Generation X, you probably
don't need much explanation. You can already see the television glowing in a
dark living room. You can hear the phones ringing behind the celebrities. You
can picture that giant tote board with the numbers climbing higher as Sunday
night turned into Monday morning.
For me, though, the Telethon was never
really about Jerry Lewis. It was about my mommy.
There was a stretch of Labor Day weekends
when I would drag a blanket and a couple pillows into the living room and make
myself a bed on the floor. My mom would get comfortable on the couch, make some
popcorn, and the two of us would announce that this was finally going to be the
year we stayed awake all night.
I never made it.
I was a chubby little kid. Ten-thirty was
apparently my physical limit. Every once in a while I would wake up, half
asleep, and see my mom still there on the couch. Sammy Davis Jr. might be
singing or Jerry would be talking. Somebody would tell another story about a
kid fighting muscular dystrophy.
Then my eyes would close again.
The next morning, before I asked what was
for breakfast, I wanted to know one thing. “How much did they raise?”
My mom knew because she always stayed up
to watch.
That may be one of the reasons the memory
still gets me. The first Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day weekend telethon aired in
1966. Jerry hosted through 2010. After that, the marathon was shortened and
shortened again until the final national telethon disappeared in 2014.
Think about that.
For most of our childhood, it seemed
permanent. Labor Day meant the Jerry Lewis Telethon the same way Thanksgiving
meant the parade, New Year's meant Dick Clark and Christmas meant Charlie
Brown.
We never considered that these things had
expiration dates.
We assumed the people sitting on the couch
will always be sitting there. We assumed the house would always smell the same.
We assumed Mom will always know the total on the tote board in the morning.
Then one day you are sixty years old, the
telethon is gone, Jerry is gone, your mom is gone, and somehow you are the one
sitting awake remembering all of them.
Maybe that is what Labor Day really does.
It doesn't just close summer. It reminds us every year that seasons close shop.
Yesterday there were swimming pools, long
evenings, baseball on the radio and sunlight hanging around until bedtime. Now
the sun hits the street at a different angle. Soon the leaves will flash their
brilliance and let go. The sweatshirts will come out. Chili goes on the stove,
chuck roast in the crockpot. Sundays are devoted to the NFL.
The “Ber” months have arrived. September.
October. November. December. My favorite stretch of the year, but before I rush
into mums, bonfires, football, Thanksgiving and Christmas, I want to turn
around once and look back at summer.
Or maybe farther than that. Back to a
living-room floor in the 1970s. A blanket, a bowl of popcorn, a glowing
television, a tote board climbing toward some impossible number.
…And my mom on the couch, staying awake
long after her little boy had fallen asleep.
We thought the Telethon would always be
there. We thought summer would always come back exactly the same. We thought
our parents would always be waiting for us when we woke up.
None of that turned out to be
true.
Which is probably why the memories matter so
much.
Labor Day has passed, Summer's tote
board has stopped…
And Tuesday morning, once again, and
I’m already in, in a daydream.
