sunday evening

Sunday evenings have always been my favorite time of the week. I wasn't one of those kids who dreaded going back to school come Monday morning, and even now, I don't get those Sunday evening doldrums about Monday morning back in the office—most of the time, I should admit.

I've always viewed Sunday evenings as a chance to gear up for the week, to think ahead to what's good, what's challenging, what's motivating {and what I'll need some extra motivation to get through}.

Sunday evening is a pause before busyness; all of Sunday should be a pause before busyness, in my view.

Sunday should be long walks. Or big cups of tea, if that's your thing.

It should be writing cards or folding clothes—just little things to check off your to-do list. Not such big tasks that they're overwhelming; Sundays are not for vacuuming the baseboards.

It should be the time you get to read the whole newspaper, not just a few stories here and there. It is, by the way, okay to start by reading the comics.

And it should be the time you let yourself watch a favorite old movie while eating popcorn and wearing your flannel pj pants {that you changed into at 7pm}.

Or confession of what I did last night: I watched a Disney movie. Not like old school Disney Beauty and the Beast, but new school Disney, the teeny bopper kind that is set in a perfect small town, one most likely in California. I know that those things are made for 12-year-olds who have no idea of what high school is like, but I—even knowing that people in high school don't fall into such clear-cut roles—get drawn to those things like underclassmen girls to the quarterback.

And related confession: I looked up the movie online today and saw that it's based on a book by Meg Cabot. You know, the lady who wrote The Princess Diaries. Oh, you didn't know that? Well, now you do. It's good to keep up on young adult lit. Then you know what the kids are talking about. Unless they use all that text-y language. Then no one knows what they're talking about.

Also, I'm headed to the library after work to get said book that was made into a Disney movie. I need a little light reading in my life.

But back to Sunday evenings: in my house growing up, Sunday evening was pizza night, which may also be playing into my perpetual Sunday evening excitement, even if I don't have pizza night any more. {Note to self: order pizza next Sunday night.}

Sunday, to me, always has been and always will be cozy family. All of us were home then, and even if we were all doing different things—homework, paying bills, playing chess—we were all there. In one house. And ready to run to the door when the pizza man came.

DH Lawrence's poem "Piano" captures my Sunday evening coziness. When I read this poem, I'm reminded of how good literature can take you somewhere else, perhaps somewhere the writer never intended you to go.

I read this poem, ostensibly about a piano and a mother and a grown man, and I don't see the image that Lawrence is painting; my own emotional picture is in the way.

I read his line "till the heart of me weeps to belong / To the old Sunday evenings at home" and I see my sister and me playing games on our old blue-screened, very early computer. I see me doing homework at the kitchen table, and I see a family game of Parcheesi or Hearts.

I like how literature can do that—how DH Lawrence {of all people; I've never cared much for him} can give me an emotional snap and reminder of why I love Sunday evenings.

piano
dh lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.