Missing
on a Weekend
Weekend Runaway -- Janine Daddo
Weekends
are subterfuges in love, desire, pain. They are the extra toppings on the
platter of life. Primroses bloom on Saturday evenings. Cigarette stubs flood
Saturday evenings. They lie on ash-trays and etherize them. Mouth-watering
delicacies arrive in baking and serving trays. A well-trimmed beard or a
perfect bun witnesses frivolousness and gaiety. A Jay whistles nearby. Its mating
call suits the ambience. The chopped air calls for celebration, the
French-fried noon - can you celebrate denial. Can you play hopscotch with
a million stars on a perfect night-sky. They stoop and rise to the rhythm of
life.
Sundays are meant for figs and olives in oil. Wearing a tan is a jewel.
Cooking stories of tulips, lettuce spinach blooms on a half-baked noon
is
sumptuous. Flurries and pastries join the row. Surrogate dreams come in
sugar-brown candies that melt in the mouth. Dreams hibernate - I made
you up in my mind -
the world drops dead, stony eyes remain. I confide in them. Those
stubborn
dreams capsize…..my adulterous heart handles felony with care.
Weekend Runaway -- Janine Daddo
The first use of the term "weekend" was in the British magazine "Notes and Queries" in 1879. (The magazine itself began in 1849 as a 19th-century version of a moderated internet newsgroup.) However, the practice arose early in the century in Britain's industrial north as a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers: emplyeees could stop working at 2pm on Saturday afternoon in exchange for a promise that they would show up for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning. In 1908 the 1st 5-day workweek in the US was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Shabbat (from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) and Christians would not have to work on their Sabbath (Sunday). In 1929 the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand a 5-day workweek and receive it. It was not until 1940, however, that a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandated a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect. Over the following decades other countries adopted the practice to harmonize with international markets.
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