Sunday Came Over For A Visit

Today I am sore.  My shoulders ache, and my hands are boulders swinging on the sinewy pendulums of my overworked arms.  My neck is stiff, and the small of my back complains bitterly any time I bend over to get something.  Even my eyes hurt.  I blame it on Sunday.  Don’t get me wrong, Sunday is nice enough, but she can have a real mean streak and little to no compassion.  Every time I want to have a nice easy visit with Sunday, she insists on doing far too much in the short time we’re together.  Sunday always seems to stuff ten pounds into a five pound sack.

Our visit started off gentle enough.  Ususally, i wake up before My Girl, and go out to watch the news in the living room.  She likes to sleep late on the weekends, and I love that too, but once the sun is up, I am too.  This time, we both woke together and spent some time giving Sunday a show.  Then I went to watch the news.

Instead of Fox News, or CNN, I ended up watching the last 45 minutes of Driving Miss Daisy.  I love that movie like an antique photo of your grandparents you keep tucked away in a drawer or in the frame of a mirror.  Something about old people makes me sad and nostalgic, no matter what’s the context of their appearance.  In this movie, I just gush at the ideas of loyalty, lifelong friendship, and silent sentiments of unmentionable love.

As the movie was winding down to its sad but genuine end, My Girl started cooking eggs, sausage, and yummy toast with jam.  When she does this on the weekends, and we have a lazy, warm breakfast together, I feel perfect.  She may think its silly, but seeing her walk into the living room with two plates of food, her hair tossled by a night’s sleep, and her lovely form clothed in a soft nightie, I can’t help but feel she is the balance for all the awfulness in my life.

So, we ate.  We watched a Bruce Willis movie, 16 Blocks, and it was quite good.  I had seen previews for it when the movie was in theatres, and said “Hey, I wanna see that!”  I never heard much more about it, so i just filed the title away in my head for perusal at a later date – which was Sunday.  The movie goes well beyond the typical cop movie, there’s a great deal of character development, subplots dragging with them some nice blind twists, and a great performance from Willis, David Morse, and surprisingly, Mos Def.

Usually, after breakfast, and whatever we watch on the tube, Sunday takes My Girl to the bedroom and puts her to sleep for a few hours.  This time, we watched some Simpsons episodes from her DVD collection of the first ten years of the show, then we went into the bedroom and I read from a book (The Dogs of Babel) we are reading to each other little by little - then she went to nap.  I closed the bedroom door, plopped down on the floor in front of the large flat panel I worship often, and started playing a video game that has been a mental challenge to me for weeks.  Portal.  If you know it, you most likely enjoy it, and have been driven mad by its higher levels.  If anyone knows how to pass 17, 18, or 19, please share the wealth of your knowledge.

After waking the girl up with another show for Sunday, we hastily threw on clothes that could be ruined, drove to the mall to pick up my oldest little sister, then all went to volunteer an hour of hard labor in my mother’s garden.  I have an extremely complicated relationship with my mom, and sometimes I wonder if that is more work than the digging and weeding.  What’s great is that we get along fine as friends, but she never cared enough about me to be my mother, and I never felt loved enough to respect her as a son should.  So, we continue to dance about life, trying to avoid each other’s toes as much as possible.

The gardening was tough work.  The ground was dry and hard, the sun was vindictive and cruel, and my youngest sister was disgruntled throughout.  She’s reaching that age and that phase when everything sucks, there is no point to life, everyone is stupid, and all of the universe is against her.  She’s becoming more like me everyday.  Though I take some smidgen of pride in that, I hurt thinking about her hurting.  She’s a really good kid, with a great life, and it makes me sad to think she feels conspired against and unimportant.  I didn’t help things later in the day, when I slightly snapped at her while she was already angry about leaving something behind at a place we went to after the garden.  Sorry Clairicus, I wasn’t trying to gang up on you, I was mainly joking and say that sort of thing only to those I love whom I want to tease.  My bad, kiddo.

After the slave driving in the dirt, we walked back to their house, changed, and got ready to go swimming!  I love water, and have always been a fish in it.  Because of my hands and arms, freestyle is not very effective, but I am a torpedo under water, using my own style that works like a charm.  I’m so at ease and graceful underwater that it would look like a dolphin or merman.  I hadn’t been swimming in almost three years, but I jumped right in and went crazy.

My sisters and I used to throw footballs around in the pool, do chicken fights, and do this thing where my youngest sister would get on the shoulders of the other one, and I would go underwater and get them on my shoulders – then I would stand up and present the world a tower of siblings for a moment before gravity destroyed our human structure.  We didn’t have a football, but we made our tower a few times, had a little splash fight, swam around like playful little seals, and spent some really enjoyable time teaching My Girl how to swim.  I had a great time with it all, but that was my favorite part of the day.  On our walk back to the house, though, my youngest sister realized she left her goggles.

Instantly, all of us groaned loudly.  I said, “God damnit, Clair!”  I was messing with her, but I’m sure it didn’t sound that way to her because she got very defensive at that.  It didn’t help matters at all when my sweet, nurturing mother yelled at her, “I’m not buying you another pair of goggles, so you’d better find them.”  Note that the goggles cost a mighty sum of five dollars.  Clair went back to find them, but had no luck and was very angry at everyone when she got home.  I’m going to buy some goggles and take them over to her today or tomorrow.

When everything was done, My Girl and I went home exhausted.  A little Jack in the Box while watching Celebrity Fit Club, and Sunday’s visit was almost over.  Most Sundays, the girl reads me the new Post Secrets at some site where people send in deep dark secrets to someone who posts them online.  She read them as I lay in bed relaxing for the first time that day.  It had been a good visit from our friend Sunday, and we decided to end the get together with another show for her.  It was a good time for all.