Would Another Monday Off Be Too Much to Ask?

It didn't totally reach me until the woman yelled to me from inside her van. I had to get it twice.

"It's closed!" she yelled. "The post office is closed!"

It was Wednesday, June 19. Why the hell would the post office be closed on a Wednesday?

She wondered, too. "I don't know why," she quickly added.

Then it hit me. "Oh, yeah," I said, loud enough for her to hear me. "It's Juneteenth Day."

Grateful, she thanked me. "I was wondering," she said.

It says a lot about the state of mind of mostly white people, both of which we were, in a small suburban town with lots and lots of them. We weren't the only ones, either.

A poor gentleman who needed a walker started getting out of his van with some difficulty, needing I suppose to mail something himself. I caught him as I drove out of the nearly vacant parking lot. I rolled down the window to deliver the same message. He looked a little disturbed and annoyed.

We shouldn't be annoyed about this, of course, and once we think about it, we should celebrate. Juneteenth is the day on which the last slaves in then far-off Confederate Texas--some would still think of it as far-off, at least in the thinking of some of its residents--discovered that, some months before, they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union's victory in the Civil War.

Last year, President Biden had signed a document declaring June 19 to be the latest federal holiday, allowing federal employees, such as post office workers, another paid day off. 

That sounds like a complaint, but it isn't, really. I mean, I wanted to drop a paid bill, with the check enclosed, inside the post office itself, instead of a federal mailbox. Why? Because a couple of years ago, there had been a spate of robberies by felons who had somehow gained access to corner mailbox keys, and who of course rifled through the boxes for checks from unsuspecting patrons. Some of them were caught and nailed with federal charges, for which I hope they serve a decent amount of jail time. 

In the meantime, though, some payments for bills never got to their intended destinations, and the prices for time and fee penalties for the hassles involved must have been staggering. I was trying, and will always try, by the way, to avoid those hassles by dropping off the payments inside the building into the nicely available slot provided.

That's why I didn't just put it in the greatly available (at least in my neighborhood) post office box. I was in the vicinity of a post office, had brought the envelope this far, so I thought I might as well complete the journey. But no--I hadn't thought about the post offices being closed in mid-week.

In fact, it's been a long, long time since considering that for anything other than Christmas or New Year's Day or July 4 had been observed. That, we absorb easily. There's an overwhelming consensus about that.

It's not like this newly declared celebration isn't warranted; it certainly is. But will it also stand as an annoyance if it's constantly shifted around during the week? Or would it be okay if it becomes, well, normalized and moved to the, let's say, 3rd Monday of June, where there are no other interruptions?

I hope it isn't racist to suggest that. I wouldn't think so. In fact, it might be seen as a bulwark of support to get it to a place people are used to as the years pass. I highly doubt that it would change the number of people who would give it serious thought as each celebration passed, one way or another.

That way, we could all show up at the post office on a Wednesday that isn't the Fourth or Christmas or New Year's and be assured that it was open. Not that it wasn't silly to suppose that, since the parking lot was empty, something wasn't up.

Now that we've made space for it, maybe Juneteenth Day can take its rightful place in the pantheon of Mondays Off. It'll be just as justified as, say, Presidents' Day, which compresses Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays to honor among others, ex-, even though he will never deserve honoring other than as a felon, rapist and mentally deranged liar. Or perhaps how stupid the country has now become. But I digress.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark