Happy Fake Holiday Day!

This was the scene in my back yard this morning.

Something like this happens every year.

It takes a while to dawn on me. At the high school track this morning, I was bewildered as to why a dozen or so girls were working out with their coach at 9 a.m. Shouldn't they be, you know, in school?

After the run, I was back at home. Why is our neighbor/landlord/friend who works in Boston still home? Shouldn't she be at, yaknow, work?

Then I went to the woods to go for a hike. I drove past a pair of teenagers sitting in the front yard of a house, playing guitar. Oh, right. What better way to celebrate Patriot's Day.

Every state has holidays, real or pseudo, and this is our big one. State offices are closed today in Massachusetts and Maine, the only two states where it's an official holiday. In Massachusetts, the day is known as Patriots' Day, but this blog is Good Morning from Maine, not Good Morning from Taxachusetts, so we go with the official, correct grammar of Patriot's Day. Do not confuse this holiday with Patriot Day, which commemorates Sept. 11. I'm sure you all knew this grammatical minutae, so we'll move on to the news of the day.

I plan on crossing this line first next year. As in at 12:01 a.m.
on New Year's Day.

In the Boston area, there will be a re-enactment of the Battle of Lexington and the Battle of Concord, which is why Patriot's Day exists. I'm not making this up.

If you don't live in New England, and God might forgive you for that, chances are you still hear something about Patriot's Day every year. A little race happens every year on this day. The Boston Marathon.

The marathon route goes right past a little stadium called Fenway Park. The Red Sawx play an 11 a.m. game every year on Patriot's Day. The race route goes just past the stadium. They show race highlights on the big TV screen in the park. The game used to end just as the runners were going by, so Fenway revelers would empty into the streets to cheer the leaders.

Fans still empty into the streets, but the race starts a little earlier now and the leaders are well past the stadium when the game ends.

Weird, right? Totally strange.

Except. Every place I've lived is strange.

Let's start with Utah. The Beehive State (that's a whole 'nother story) has Pioneer Day, which celebrates the arrival of Mormon settlers into the Salt Lake Valley. There's a weeklong pioneer rodeo. There's a huge parade, for which people camp out days in advance to secure good seats.

Non-Mormons celebrate Pie 'n' Beer Day, which is more self-explanatory.

Minnesotans might be smirking right now, but not so fast. The first deer hunting weekend of the season always made our grade school a missing-male ghost town. Because my Dad never loved me, I never went deer hunting and was often one of just a handful of boys in class that day. Not to be outdone, there's the fishing opener. That's when the governor wakes up at 4 a.m. and pretends to catch a bass. I'm pretty sure there's an aide under the boat attaching a bass to his fishing line every year.

Funny, right? It's even got its own website.

The most normal state I've lived in, by the metric of bizarre traditions, is Florida. This is pretty much its own joke because Florida is the least-normal state in the union. It has its own news section on fark.com because such stupid things happen there. The most recent headline on that website:

"Ketchup-covered homeless man lies in middle of the street to profanely protest how tourism has ruined Key West."

The moral of the story is something Ma used to tell me: We're all weird. Every last one of us. I'd expand on that notion but I'm out of time. The Gawdamn Sawx are on and I'm going to watch them because I'm done with my exercise for the day, unemployed, and not interested in doing anything more today. It is a holiday, after all.