Sunday Again

And the lawnmowers are buzzing, fat, gasoline-perfumed bees, harvesting the week's growth noisily. Up early, we have eggs, and biscuits and sausage-spiked country gravy with lots of black pepper. Half of one of the big sweet navel oranges each, sticky and sliced into quarters; espresso for him and Earl Grey decaf with milk for me. We watch the news and discuss how the world is turning into a Phillip K. Dick novel a little bit at a time.

No plans stretch out in front of me.

The hubby has to go to work, to slog away at a curriculum design for teaching fresh young wet-behind-the-ear aviators about electronic stuff while the young aviators*, newly out of college and believing they are the smartest, best-looking, most intelligent people to ever grace the world with their presence preen about like young roosters clucking over themselves. Not knowing they could be next week's fryer.

When he tells me about these students and their arrogance, I think back to my days as a young woman in Pensacola, where there are dozens of crops of these young aviators every year, all buying the same sports car and putting the same vanity license plate on it (it'll say "AV-8-OR" or some derivative). All believing in their own right to rule the world. And some girls selling that belief to them on the odd chance they'll take them with. And how I ignored those boys until I found one driving a beat up old rust-red truck with a door handle that didn't work and the strong belief that he might, at any time, end up back in Texas working on an MBA for job he didn't like doing............

Sunday blogging is quiet-- few people read and/or comment on the weekend. Blogging is most likely the province of people in cubicles during the week, who are taking a moment's respite from some TPS report to check in to what others are doing. Sunday and the sun shining means antiquing in a small town with elevated prices for someone's old junk. Sitting in a park watching people throw frisbees to dogs with a bandana around their neck. Crowding the Best Buy to see if the CD or computer game you've been wanting is out yet. Lining up at Starbuck's for slightly bitter coffee and dry scones. I look forward to doing absolutely none of those things. It's a great thought.

What did people do on Sunday in the past (other than church; I got that one.)? Before shopping malls, before cars could drag you hundreds of miles to other cities to go to old-fashioned, dustier shopping malls and the anticipation of finding a treasure some yokel doesn't realize is a golden egg? I guess there was church to get ready for, and breakfast, and sitting in a big room with a lot of other people, holding church bulletins and singing, shaking hands with the preacher who stands in the dust-dappled sun at the edge of the door, the last hurdle to jump.....and then lunch afterwards, and then sitting in a rocking chair or a swing on a porch or in a back yard, maybe with a glass of iced tea or lemonade, lulled into almost naptime by good food and contemplation, maybe a little gossip about someone from that church, and then belly laughs and smiles as the baby finds a dandelion in the yard and eats it. At least it wasn't the black bug trundling along the porch, importantly. And then dinner to cook and then later some reading or knitting by a lamp and laughing as the baby finds a piece of fluff on the floor and eats it. Scooping the baby up, wiggly, for a bath and powder and last dinner and kisses. Then getting ready for bed and Monday morning where someone did not go to a cubicle but did what? Worked in an office without cubicles, but without air conditioning too.

There are good things to be said about either practice. I like a day full of nothing ahead. Potential, possibilities. The neighborhood filled with the droning of those lawn mowers. And my yard, laden with weeds and scruffy, me pretending not to notice the wilderness of grass and flowers, at least for one more day.

It's Sunday.

*How many aviators does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one-- he holds the lightbulb, and the world revolves around him.