Praise be for Sunday afternoon solitude, the animals wrapped in their own bodies on cushions around the room, and the warm cup of steaming hot coffee filling the house with smell. Praise the remote control pointed at a television switched off earlier in the day on which the day’s big football game never played out. Praise the sounds of neighborhood lawnmowers whirring to life seconds after the quarterback throws an incompletion that puts a merciful end to the home team’s ugly drubbing in a familiar stadium – three hours wasted rooting for the losers and now they’re out trudging through the lawns wet from a week’s worth of rain.
These men, as evidenced by their bellies, are given to drinking beer on game day. I doubt that they realize the quiet moments of relaxation they are missing out on witht the televison going all day or some loud activity to sidetrack the. But their wives know and they must recognize it the same way I do when all that is supposed to be done on Sunday, as usual, is either accomplished or postponed to the next weekend prior to 4 p.m.
Most of the houses on the outside appear to be quiet. Through the thin opening in the screen door, I can hear heavy breathing dogs in the backyard, chasing each other from fence to fence, around the trees and small piles of mulch. When the dogs stop to take a drink from an old aluminum water bowl, the sun breaks through, the faces of houses seem to smile as the paint on them brightens. All of outdoors except for the locusts is dead silent as everyone looks up to see the great light sourse that has wrapped itself in clouds the deepest gray it was though the sun and sky were attending a funeral with big, wet downpours of fat tears. I am gradually tiring, just sitting here and enjoying the quiet while the children sleep.
Nearly every weekend, about this time in the afternoon, I start to think about heating what’s left of the morning coffee, the last murky cup or two that’s been sitting in the pot since the warmer clicked off six or maybe eight hours ago. This is the last part of the pot that my wife thoughtlessly pours down the drain if she chooses to drink coffee so late in the day. For those of us new the coffee realm, pouring out so much of the pot seems like a total waste. My wife claims drinking a pot several hours old is wrong and that the taste is stale. But as a novice, I taste no difference. I drink not for taste, but for the false energy.
Now one of the cats has decided to lay on my lap where I balance the cup as I write. Each time the dog barks, he lifts his head in fear, and then settles back in to his purring. I am envious of his ability to sleep in the afternoon, to carelessly burn the day while his master is hard at work, attempting to perfect a craft that can’t be perfected. Constant writing fueled bu coffee and false passion, at least for today, rates far below an afternoon nap. The day seems quieter now as I start to dream about sleep. The sun goes back to its favorite resting place of late behind the clouds, and the day grays up again. In the winter, the melancholy of a day like this together with a drafty house are plenty enough to send me to a heated bed for sleep. Today, though, there is jusy enough summer left and black coffee to keep me gaining ground on a decent first novel.
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Tags: Sunday
Sunday Early
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Morning’s broken and fall breezes filter in through the windows pre-maturely, a day before summer’s man-made end. Each wind shift brings in a faint rotting smell from hedge apples lying in the cut grassblades from the previous weekend, all smelling as sweet as warm cider.
My granfather had a full apple tree on his land a long time ago. Every fall we’d collect the apples that had been pecked to the ground by robin’s into a bucket and he’d pitch them to us for batting practice. The smells of summer dieing takes me back to eight or 10 years old. I can’t feel the coarse bat in my hands and the tightness in my back as I swing toward a distant tree line.
The night was never cool enough for dew to set in. The windows in the cars that line the streets are dry, not sweaty, and the sidewalks are still the color of cement, not wet paper bags.
This early, the crickets chirp as though it were twilight while the world rumbles to wake – traffic on the interstate a few miles off, an airplane cracking the silence above the low-lying rooftops, and early conversation from the men who step out to the driveway for a smoke and let their old dogs have their way in the yard. This sets the other dogs to barking and soon the day is ushered in as the sun gradually climbs to a place where it can watch over part of the world.
On crisp mornings like this, children sit on couches, swaddled in blankets, watching cartoons to the sweet smells of syrup, cinnamon rolls and fruit-laden breads. Lamps left on overnight at the tops of stairwells or in long halls grow weaker as the brightness advances – as more sun trickles in the windows. Fans that were left on all night to circulate the air are switched off because the wind is too cool. House cats scratch at the door as Tom cats return home from glorious nights prowling the sewer, hiding in window wells and crossing streets lit by orange glows from streetlamps – prancing from underneath cars.
When fall and winter come, the Tom cats will finnagle their way inside, bottled up until nect spring when the sweet smell is for for arrival – for the living – not departure. Memories, if we’re not careful, can pass as easily as the seasons come and go.
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Tags: Sunday
Both girls are at the table for breakfast, observing the temporary but appreciated comity that comes each Sunday morning. The peace lasts between them but not in the house as the younger one, whose bowl has run empty of cereal, begins hammering the table with her toddler-sized spoon.
The racket it creates in the all-wood dining room is tremendous, and it sounds as though a half-dozen full-size workmen are in the room with hammers in hand and nails in teeth pummeling sheet rock across bare walls. That is merely the sound of it. The real culprit has tangly golden hair and wears a pink nightgown with a single stretch of ballerinas across the chest. She’s backlit by the windows on the front of the house and the thin, baby tree that’s the same age as her, but taller and more reserved.
One holler from her father and she drops the spoon. She goes back to eating, which, with cereal, is an activity that involves streaking milk across the table top. Her sister, the oldest, cleans up her bowl without any real notice of the younger, not so much as even a laugh to encourage more outlandish behavior.
Surprisingly, the peacefulness breaks in a confrontation with the house’s only boy and his younger sister. The fight involves a card game that involes arranging cards in a particular order on the floor and when the little girl screams, the boy tells him the fight occured because he doesn’t want to share. Fair enough, the house’s proprietor thinks, as the house temporarily still again. It is quiet enough that the dog can sleep and a car door far up the street can heard closing. The weather looks beautiful today and the light comes strewaming in on the chairs at the dinner freshly pushed out from a brief breakfast. These children are just now gaining their energy for the day, so the volumes will rise and the pace for confrontations much faster, and that is the most threatening fact to parents who are responsible for discipline.
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Tags: Kids, Sunday
