The NABC Weekend: It isn't May 1, but it's Labor Day nonetheless.

The Bicentennial Park concert series closed last Friday with a rainout, and Labor Day usually provides a break between the crowded summer schedule and the insane amount of events crammed into September and the first two weeks of October.

Of course the very fact of the coming weekend's dedication to "labor," in a country opposed to a living wage, illustrates our customarily oblivious American exceptionalism. We've detached our "labor" holiday from the rest of the world’s.

For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.

Tomato and watermelon season draws to close, and while it's far too early (and hot) to contemplate autumn's symbolism, I'm beginning to feel elegiac. My guess is that this too shall pass ... as soon as I go to work.