A Ploughman's Lunch: Memorial Day Edition

Pirate summers, wild country, and rabbit holes.

Memorial Day has always been my favorite holiday. Its joy — that it typically coincides with my birthday and is the unofficial start to summer¹ — is uniquely contrasted by its underlying purpose: to remember the sacrifices that allow us the freedom to drink a couple cold ones, grill a couple burgers², and lounge around by a body of water. Take a moment this weekend to remember that³ — even if it’s while listening to a little Zac Brown Band⁴.

The Family CWD is decamping to New Hampshire to celebrate⁵, so I don’t have too much for you. Instead, we’ll do another edition of A Ploughman’s Lunch, where I drop a scattering of disjointed images at you⁶, letting you connect your own dots.

Enjoy the long — and hopefully restful — weekend and next week we’ll be back to our regular programming.

⁷

1. We’re at the time of year I like to call the “pirate summer.” It evokes being barefoot on the beach, bonfires, and exploration on the water. Building sandcastles, skipping rocks, fishing poorly.

The great Kenny Chesney perhaps explained it best: “No shirt, no shoes, no problem.”

The idea of a pirate summer came to me last year, as I was transitioning out of one job and into one with significantly fewer guardrails. There’s a certain sense of anxiousness when you make any transition — and I mean anxiousness not really as nervousness, but more as sense of excitement — and navigating the slack tide between moves it only felt appropriate to embrace this ethos. Ideally, this summer, the whole Family CWD will double down on it!

2. Or hot dogs.

3. You could, as I do every year, do the Murph workout — which you can read about here.

4. Uncle CWD in Florida once gave a guest lecture at the middle school in Rhode Island at which I taught right after college. The school drew kids from Central Falls and Pawtucket, Cumberland and Lincoln. As part of his biography, he alluded to the fact that he was “raised beneath the shade of the Florida pines,” a reference to “Chicken Fried” by Zac Brown Band and the song I am invoking above. The kids, who, in the early 2010s, listened mostly, if I recall correctly, to 2Chainz, had no idea what he was talking about, but still wanted to sign up for his class on “The Math of Pokemon.”

He went on to describe, to seventh graders, most of whom could barely do long division, the complex algebraic equations involved in a Pokemon battle. Needless to say, it went over most of the kids’ heads — but, for their part, they did humor him and refrained from heckling him out of the room.

(Cheffy will remember Zuzu, Naz, and Mike Ajuan — who were perhaps the only scholars who took anything away from that lecture.)

This has nothing to do, of course, with Memorial Day, but I think about it every time that song comes on the radio.

5. Along with an Aunties and Uncles, nieces and nephews CWD galore. I’m sure most of you are waiting with bated breath to learn who will win the first annual CWD doubles tennis tournament, how many s’mores the collective Kiddos CWD will consume, whether any unexpected visitors show up, whether I’ll bag a NH turkey on the Winterfell driveway, how Uncle Steady and I will fare on a 3K test swim and paddle, and whether Mrs. CWD and anyone else will join in with me doing Murph.

Find out next week!

6. If you’d like the provenance of any of these, please inquire in the comments.

7. Speaking of rabbit holes, I’ve been loving DTRH lately, where

Henry Rundio

posts cool stuff he’s been going down the rabbit hole on — worth checking out if you, too, like cool stuff.