Have I mentioned, lately, how much I love Sunday morning? It probably seems strange that I prefer any particular morning of the week, since, honestly, they're all pretty much the same these days, but I do love Sunday mornings.
We don't need to go to a psychiatrist to figure out why, either. It's simple enough to track it back to when I was a kid. You see, my dad worked Monday through Saturday at our family drugstore. So the only day we were all at home was Sunday.
For those of you worrying about my eternal soul (oh. how nice of you, by the way), my mom would take us to Saturday night Mass, and when I was little we had our catechism classes on Wednesdays after school. So on Sunday morning Dad would go off to church, then come home around 10:30 and we would have the entire day at home as a family.
My parents did have one rule for Sundays: It was a family day, so you couldn't go out and do other things that day. If you wanted to see friends, they should come over to our house. As we got older that changed, some, but we still always had Sunday dinner as a family. But none of that is--technically--about Sunday morning.
Some Sunday mornings we would actually get up and go to church with my dad. He goes to the UCC church, and while the Catholic church in town has never been known for its choir (and on many Saturday nights there was only an organist and no choir at all), the UCC church had great music. So it was always fun to go with Dad and sing along with the choir. The readings were almost always the same from Saturday night to Sunday, but the folks at the UCC were always better dressed than our ragtag bunch tended to be on Saturday nights. And it was always exciting to spend that hour "alone" with Dad.
We'd come home from church with Dad and then spend the morning reading the newspaper, or--in the fall--going out for a little "road hunting" for pheasants, and frequently there would be some kind of brunch-y meal that Mom would put together in the late morning.
And, if you haven't already figured it out, this feeling about Sundays still carries over into my life. When I go home to visit, I try to schedule myself to leave on Monday, instead of Sunday, so I can have that time. And in my "regular" life, most weeks I try not to schedule things for Sundays until at least noon. There's just something about being curled up on the couch with the Sunday paper that allows the world outside to stay outside.
That all said, I need to get moving. Somehow or other we're meeting our friends for "brunch" at 9:15 this morning. But at least I've had an hour of this morning--paper at the ready, winter happily outside--to daydream about those easy Sunday mornings.
No comments:
Post a Comment