Momma’s boy.

8 May 2002—A couple of weeks ago, on Earth Day, I walked to work. No, no, don’t congratulate me. Truth is, it’s a shameful thing, but I drive to work most days, and I only work a mile from my house. Yes, now you see. In my pitiful defense…no, never mind, I haven’t even a pitiful defense to raise. Simply put, I’m not a morning person, and I wake up too late to do my morning things and get to work at a reasonable time if I walk. I don’t even get there at a reasonable time considering that I drive.

Horrible, horrible. I know.

I used to skate to work most days, but finally I just got tired of how much my skates were hurting me, and I’ve resisted getting a new pair since I only got these a couple of years ago. Did I mention how much they hurt?

But on that gorgeous April day a fortnight ago, during which we were meant to celebrate what we have left of the planet and pray too much more of it doesn’t dwindle away before 22 April next, I knew it would be pure sacrilege to drive, and so I walked.

You know, it was fun!

Sure, I know every day is supposed to be Earth Day, so the saying goes. But to be honest, for the most part Americans really only say that saying on Earth Day. Or they really only hear it on Earth Day, which, as far as I can tell, is just an arbitrarily picked day to begin with.

Arbitrariness, you know, is a component of most major holidays. Take New Year’s Day, for example. It’s the first of January here in America only because we’ve agreed to use the Gregorian calendar. The Jewish New Year’s Day is another day (actually, Jews have four separate New Year’s Days), and the Chinese New Year is another day still. This doesn’t even begin to take into consideration Muslims, Hindus, Burmese, or countless other peoples around the planet. Forget New Year’s Day; there’s no consensus as to even which year this is: 2002 to some, 1421 to some, 4700 to some, 5760 to some, 1379 to some, 157 to some, 533 to some, 1469 to some, 1368 to some, and that doesn’t even count the scientists, who think it’s generally somewhere around 4,500,000,000, give or take.

Millennium Bug. Feh. Someone better get cracking on the Five Billion Bug, if you ask me. (Unless, of course, it turns out every day is not actually Earth Day, and we won’t have to worry about the Five Billion Bug after all.)

Amazingly, despite these competing notions of calendars, somehow most people in the world have agreed at least to a system of marking time, dividing days into 24 hours, dividing each hour into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. Even more boggling is how so many people have agreed, more or less, to a system of time zones and an international dateline. And yet, all of it was arbitrarily picked. But wait, you say, all of those numbers go easily into 360, which is the number of degrees of a circle—not so arbitrary after all!

Yeah, but the 360 is arbitrary, too.

I’m of a couple of minds on the whole arbitrariness thing. On one hand, there are very few measurable absolutes in this world, unless you’re a religious fundamentalist, and well, their lines are kinda hazy too. (“Thou shalt not kill,” anyone?) Even the absolutes we think we know, such as absolute zero in temperature (for which there are no fewer than three arbitrary ways of measuring), may be correct, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn out to be just the limits of our current knowledge.

Thus most systems are arrived at by varying degrees of whim and consideration. Those in power set the systems, to which the less powerful agree either through concurrence or coercion. The problem is that there are moralists who believe one system is absolutely right. When they’re in the majority, they will always try to destroy an alternate system that challenges the status quo, which is what the self-proclaimed protectors of “correct” English did to belittle those who sought recognition for Ebonics a few years ago.

I thought both systems had a right to exist. What surprised me most was that hardly anyone seemed to realize that “standard English” is just a bunch of made-up rules that a whole lot of us, myself included, happen to think is worthwhile.

That leads me to my on-the-other-hand statement, which you were undoubtedly expecting because earlier I wrote “on one hand,” and in one arbitrary system of common sense, you expect that there are at least two hands when “one hand” is brought up. (Indeed, in Fiddler on the Roof there’s, like, four or five hands going on.)

Anyway, on the other hand, just because something is arbitrary doesn’t make it any less valid. Take holidays, once again. The Earth Day founder probably closed his eyes, circled his finger in the air and brought it down on a calendar page, thereby fixing 22 April as the planet’s day in the sun, so to speak. But after 32 years of Earth Days, it’s become a tradition, and that has meaning in and of itself.

Then there’s Mother’s Day. The cynics are wrong, by the way; it wasn’t invented by the flower industry. It was kind of a home-grown observance with roots in ancient Greece. The woman credited with starting the American version of the holiday apparently protested what she saw as a developing commercialism concerning the holiday. Still, since Woodrow Wilson signed it into law in 1914 it has been a national holiday, celebrated on the second Sunday of May.

And a damn fine holiday it is, too, and I’ll tell you why: I love my mom. We’re great friends: we talk for hours, we have the same strange sense of humor, the same good habits, the same bad habits. She’s a vibrant person, she’s caring, smart, honest and strong, she’s a wonderful musician, she’s a fantastic writer and teacher, and she’s a fabulous crossword-puzzle-solving partner. We don’t always agree about things, but we usually have a wonderful time talking about them. She even, bless her heart, tried to honor my name change (I wasn’t born with this funky name, you know), but it just didn’t sound right, so I made her stop. But she’s always been supportive and encouraging, and I’m always grateful for that.

My folks live on the road, traveling from place to place, so they’re not always in range where the cell phone works. Once, though, we all happened to be in Portland during the second weekend in May, so we were able to spend Mother’s Day together. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the first time we happened to be elsewhere in the country at the same time–there was that week in 1998 that we were all in Estes Park, Colorado. Bizarre.

I’m not sure where they’re going to be this Sunday, but I imagine they’ll have phone access. In the meantime, though, I’m posting this for the world to see. If any readers would like to send my mom a Mother’s Day greeting, here’s her email address. Tell her I sentcha.

Here’s to you, Momma: Happy Mother’s Day. As far as I’m concerned, every day should be Mother’s Day. Hm. I guess that means that if one feels that the earth is also our mother, then it follows that every day really would be Earth Day, though where does that leave us with 22 April? Oh, I don’t know. Let’s leave it for the holiday-arbitrators to work out.