Overnight Holidays

We went out for our usual Saturday grocery shopping date with Cynch yesterday. At lunch--we tried Tokyo Boy, dining on bento boxes and gyoza, yum--Cynch mentioned that Monday is a holiday. Monday, as in tomorrow.

"What?" I said.

"A non-working holiday," she said.

Which means no school for Lizzie.

I must've looked my usual muddled, because Cynch explained. "It's because the head of the Iglesia ni Christo church died," she said. She'd had trouble getting to campus to pick us up. Commonwealth, the tangled crazy avenue that runs past the main entrance to the University, leads straight to the Iglesia ni Christo church, a green and white spired building that, from a distance, looks like something from a Disney set. It's the church's main headquarters, it turns out, and the man who died this week is the church's leader. So the necrological services have been going on for days, and traffic is clogged. Cynch says that they've parked their cars in the street. Cops have bodily lifted cars up, straight into the air, to move them out of the way. "They're creating new holidays to honor different religious groups," Cynch went on.

"I had no idea we'd have a holiday," I said, still dazed.

"No. That's because they just created it," she said. "And on September 21, there will be a holiday for the Muslims."

Huh?

I don't teach on Mondays, or schedule meetings, either, so the holiday will pass over me without leaving a mark. Lizzie, however, will not have classes. And I'm taking her out of school on Friday for our trip to Singapore.

Oh well. Lizzie and I will have to figure out a way to spend the day. I've got a hankering to see a zoo. But I'm sure zoos will be closed on non-working holidays. If I owned a zoo, anyway, I'd close it.