The Good Earthday Birthday

Earth Day. What a great day to celebrate. Why don't we celebrate it more? Many school districts in Wisconsin still let out students for Good Friday, but the best we get to honor the ground under our feet is a school assembly, perhaps, in some uncomfortable overheated gymnasium followed by a litter pick-up of the school yard. And this is in the state where the great Gaylord Nelson lived, the founder of Earth Day and one of the greatest political men to grace this century. Nelson is to Earth Day what Santa is to Christmas, what Jesus is to Easter, what Zorro is to Masked Champions of Justice Day, Al Gore is a small man next to Gaylord, and Al Gore is one heck of a big man by all earthly and ecological standards.

Why don't we have a real holiday on Earth Day? Couldn't we maybe combine Veteran's Day and Memorial Day into one super parade of soldiers day? No one really knows what to do on Veteran's Day, anyway. There are so many amazing ways every single one of us could celebrate a national holiday honoring our planet. You could even pick litter out of the hedgerow round the school yard if that really was what you thought important. Or you might plant your garden or your starter peat pots, depending on your climate. Go all day without using a motor. Go all day without using electricity. Hang your laundry outside and remember what it smells like to sleep between sun-kissed linens. Now there's a fantastic cure for insomnia!

It appalls me that Wisconisn schools quietly continue observing Good Friday as a holiday. Oh, they don't call it that, but it is, and sometimes, even here in the liberal hotbed of Madison, they sneak in something called Easter Monday, too. My neighbors, both educators and moms of grade school kids as well, told me that this year, when it struck me as odd that they all were at home on a Monday. Apparently, Madison, in true liberal style, vacillates on religion along with every other issue, using an every-other-year formula to schedule its Spring Break: one year following the University's irreligious calendar, the next the church calendar. Is this what is meant by the separation of church and state? And Easter apparently includes this day I've never heard of before: Easter Monday. I mean, what happened on Easter Monday? Is it sort of like Boxing Day? Do we pack up the schnibbles of green plastic Easter grass that have escaped from the baskets of Easter eggs and insinuated themselves not only into every corner of the house, but to the sleeve of every sweater we own as well? Easter Monday? It makes me think of a Jesus coming out of the grave, looking around, and seeing no one of particular interest, going back into the grave, giving us another month of winter. No one likes going back to work on Monday, not even the Savior, I guess.

So Happy Earthday Birthday. My son turns 21 in two more days, and when he was a first grader, we celebrated with an Earthday Birthday party. We played "Clean Up My Backyard" over a badminton net, with wads of old newspapers batted and flung over the net from side to side in a race to clean one team's lawn space completely. We played a variation of my childhood game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey by directing blindfolded children holding big sopping wet sponges toward an Evil Ecological Villian I'd painted on the wooden privacy fence in my backyard. We swung on "vines" draped off the crabapple tree branches over a small swimming pool filled with blue jello and crocodiles in danger of extinction. Oh we had fun and so could we all..if Earth Day were not a work day and Good Friday was left for religions to celebrate, not school children.

It is our Good Earth we should celebrate; our Good Earth we need to protect. Taking a day off on Good Friday does very little for Jesus, whose fate seems relatively decided already, but taking a day off could be amazing for the Earth, especially if we all declined to drive for a day or to use our dishwashers for a day or we prepared our gardens to grow vegetables that will feed us without chemicals this summer. Our earth. Our good earth.

Which brings to mind another great Wisconsinite: Edna Ferber, who went to high school in the same little northern city I did: Appleton. I'll have to write about Edna another time. More on Gaylord, too. Meanwhile, Happy Earth Day.

And thanks, Gaylord, if you're listening somehow.