I asked the table on Thursday night, somewhere between the second course and the second bottle, whether anyone could say — without their phone, without a hedge — what the holiday tomorrow actually commemorated. Six adults. One nodded toward Texas. One said, with great confidence, “the Civil War,” which is a little like saying the moon landing was “about science.” The others studied the centerpiece.
Eliza had moved her dinner from Friday to Thursday because, she explained at the invitation stage, “everybody has Friday off anyway,” and nobody at the table found this phrasing remarkable. The markets were closed. The post office was closed. Federal Washington had cleared its calendar with the brisk efficiency of a city that has learned to enjoy a three-day weekend without specifying which weekend, or why.
The bipartisan lobbyist arrived in linen and announced he was “making a long one of it.” Pressed gently on what he meant, he said the cabin. Pressed less gently by me, he allowed that his firm had sent a memo about “observance” that he had not finished reading, and then he asked Eliza about the lamb.
I am told — by a friend whose neighbor’s daughter works in HR at a firm I will not name — that the internal communications on the subject this year used the word “reflection” eleven times and the word “emancipation” zero. The graphic was a sunrise. The sunrise was generic. The graphic had been used, the daughter noted, for International Women’s Day, for Earth Day, and for the firm’s annual wellness initiative, which is at least an honest admission that the marketing department has run out of skies.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the resigned humor of someone who watches Americans interact with their own founding documents, told me last week that traffic to the relevant exhibits had not measurably moved. Traffic to the gift shop, she said, had. The mug that says WE THE PEOPLE in distressed lettering is doing, in her phrase, “Father’s Day numbers.” She said this without inflection, which is how Judy says everything that matters.
I do not begrudge anyone a day off. I have taken many of them, often for less. What I noticed at Eliza’s was something subtler and, I think, worse: a holiday processed entirely through the language of logistics. The pool was open. Costco was crowded. One guest had used the morning to buy his father a grill attachment, and reported, unprompted, that the parking lot at Lowe’s had been “a Saturday.” The Fourth was three weeks out and already being planned. The day in between was a tile to be walked over.
Somebody — I think it was the lobbyist’s wife, who is sharper than he is — did try. She mentioned Galveston. She mentioned General Granger. She got two sentences in before the conversation, with the practiced reflex of a Georgetown table, slid sideways into a discussion of whether the rosé was too cold. Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” Eliza says “Margaret, please” the way other women say grace.
This is the part of the column where, thirty years ago, I would have written a sentence about what a country owes its newest federal holiday, and what it means when the holiday is absorbed into the long weekend before the ink on the proclamation has dried. I am told that kind of sentence does not perform anymore. So I will say only what I observed. We had the lamb. We complimented the wine. The lobbyist told a story about his cabin. Eliza was already, audibly, planning the Fourth.
We called it the long weekend. We asked for the recipe. Nobody at the table said the word.