sundays were free

"Sundays were free! They were days of tranquillity and general bliss. Perhaps we slept later on rainy winter Sundays, but usually we got up early and eagerly. Breakfast was special, with waffles now and then, and no school, and no piano practice. We talked and laughed." (M.F.K. Fisher, "Hellfire and All That")

The pause afforded by a Sunday afternoon has, historically, been a dangerous thing for me. The manic nature of a busy week leads to a proportionate depression when, with the dying of the car engine in the driveway upon returning from church, everything stops. Time, it seems, falls into a rut and doesn't feel like dragging itself out again.

I used to get ravenously hungry when we walked in the door, at about 12.30pm. My church clothes would be digging creases into my waist, and my feet hurt. I would run upstairs to my room to change clothes. Then, no matter how hungry I was, or how urgently my help was needed in the kitchen, I felt influenced by the torpid warmth of my room, freshened by a little breath of breeze through the door I had just opened for the first time in three hours, and the suggestively wilting sun glowing behind the slats of the blinds, to fall face-forward onto the bed and sleep like the dead.

There was always somebody sleeping on Sunday. When lunch was over, my mom went up to bed. My dad would fall asleep in front of a game on the TV. I would go upstairs and start to listen to the rebroadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, and wake up in the middle of This American Life. When I went downstairs, I had to be quiet, since someone else was usually asleep by then. Until around five in the evening, it was highly inconsiderate to talk in a normal tone of voice.

When I went away to college, Sunday afternoons were the worst times for my chronic nostalgia. Or, maybe, they were the best. Nostalgia is like the pain of getting rid of a hangnail, or what I imagine trichotillomania to be--as much a pleasure as it is a pain. I know I never tried hard to get past the overwhelmingly heavy sweetness that crept upon me while I sang the final hymn at church, engulfing me when I came in the door of one of my series of lonely apartments (on Maryland Avenue, on Spa Road, on Prince George Street, in Pinkney Hall). I never tried to fend it off. Sometimes I would call home, to hear a voice, but more often I just took off my shoes and my coat and fell into the warmth of my bed and pulled the covers over my head and sighed. Sometimes I cried a little, but that was more the tremors of tiredness than of real heartsickness, like the weakness that comes the day after having the twenty-four-hour flu.

Toward the second half of my second year, the nostalgia started to wear off my memories of home, because home started to change. J and W had become my new home in almost every way--I didn't live with them under any formal agreement, but theirs had become the safe place, the unassailable sanctuary of nourishment and comfort and hope and rest. Sunday afternoons I went to their house, whenever I could make the excuse, and I chatted with J while she alchemized in the kitchen. Usually she was baking something on Sunday afternoons--blondies for her kids, or cinnamon rolls for no reason, or gingerbread for Christmas. One time I came over and she was sculpting mushrooms out of cinnamon-dusted meringue, for a buche Noël. We played with her birds, and knitted, and watched her kids come in and out of the kitchen, and made fun of people we knew, and griped about our mothers, and quoted movie lines, and I wished that Sunday afternoon would last for freaking ever. The pain was glorious. She usually went to take a nap at some point within all of this, and I would clean up the kitchen and talk with whoever was around. If no one was around, I would do homework or read books while lying on the couch, or fall asleep while listening to A Prairie Home Companion and wake up in the middle of This American Life.

When I moved to New York last year, Sundays were a push and pull of longing and distaste. On one hand, church didn't start until afternoon, which gave me the freedom of Sunday morning, with tea and the radio, that I had long coveted. On the other hand, the imperative sleepiness of Sunday afternoon must, in that case, give way to the project of helping set up for the church service in the cathedral we rented on West 22nd Street. And by the time church was over, there was no time for the ensuing nostalgia with its anticlimactic nap--I had to get ready for work the next day. It resulted in the break-up of the entire rhythm of the week. My nostalgia was not cured, only stifled.

When I decided to leave New York and move back to California, one of the things I most eagerly awaited was resumption of the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. The foggy morning drive to church, followed by the impatient return home to divest myself of the uncomfortable church clothes, the urgent preparation of Sunday lunch, the ensuing lethargy with my dad falling asleep on the couch in front of the game, and my mom staggering upstairs to nap, and myself sprawled on the floor, half-listening to the radio and steeping in the fulfillment of ten years' longing.

I really thought that.

A few complications, naturally, ensued. This year has been the hottest I have ever known in southern California--foggy mornings and honeyed noontime warmth were unavailable. More to the point, my church, and my family, and I have changed dramatically in character and behavioral patterns since I lived there. Specifically, I don't live at "home" now. The elements are out of their old order, and the resulting composition is unfamiliar. The worn-in ways I longed after were discarded so long ago that nobody knows what I'm missing.

Can you imagine the rude awakening?
Can you conceive of the glorious freedom?

It's really laughable to see how long it has taken me, since moving back here, to realize that Things Are Different. For eight months, I have been going to the family's house and trying to fit what now happens on a Sunday into the frame of my expectations. Trying to remember according to the present. It has been more frustrating, more distressing, than you might guess. Have you tried switching to green tea when you are used to coffee? It's been like that. The heavy, sweet addiction requires much to feed it.

I started to be nostalgic for J's house, then, but it wouldn't suffice, for two reasons. One has been discussed in an earlier post--I visited her last spring and came to terms with the inevitability of change there. The other reason is that I had begun to feed my nostalgia with the hope of fulfillment. That is strong stuff. Mere indulgence of memory was no longer enough.

Last Sunday, I was bone tired, from a busy week and several early mornings in a row. Instead of making my dutiful pilgrimage to the family house, I went to my lonely apartment and shucked off my shoes and fell into bed and pulled the covers over my head. Then I reached out and turned on the radio. Prairie Home Companion was on. I fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of This American Life. I looked around my darkened room, badly in need of tidying, insulated by the hum of the air conditioner, feeling my bones slowly reform after their melting repose. I thought, here it is. This is all I needed. The Sunday afternoon of the past has become the Sunday afternoon of the future.