rainy days and sundays . . .

11:04, Sunday night.  I'm tired, and I really don't want to write. But I said I would write everyday, and it's looks like I'm just going to make it.  

Sundays have a sort of time-machine quality for me.  From the minute I wake up in the morning I'm instantly transported back in time, to 1984 or 85.  For someone who disliked school, Sunday was a day I hoped would never end, every passing moment was a moment closer to the inevitable.  

Sunday was also a lonely day, not because I was particularly more lonely on Sunday on any other day, but because it seemed to me I was the only person in the world who felt this way about Sundays.  I think my friends, for the most part, liked school.  Not that they did all that well, of course--none of us did all that well.  But, for the most part, they seemed to like the routine of it, or it least they weren't up for challenging its inexorable reality.  

I tried to extend my Sundays, to hold out as long as I could against the reality of Monday morning. I would take long walks on dark Sunday evenings.  I remember the autumn evenings the most. I can still feel the chill of the air and the crunch of almost frozen leaves beneath my feet.  I would fight as hard as I could against the cold, roll my hands up into the sleeves of my Levi's jacket, pull my collar tight around my neck.  At some point, however, the cold would win, and I would head home, out of the cold, but not out of options. I wasn't ready to surrender, not ready to wave my white flag and let the coming week win.

Thinking about it now, I can see how Monty Python's Flying Circus came to mean so much to me. Python came was played at eleven on our local PBS station, and although I was supposed to be in bed by then, I regularly found myself down to the living room, tuning in our aging television to the UHF band.  I watched intently and I laughed to myself; I sat with my face four inches from the screen, so I could hear, but my mother--fast asleep in the bedroom above--couldn't. In Monty Python I found friends, a comrades, a companions.  They were my company for a the the last few minutes of Sunday; I could forget, for awhile at least, the week that awaited.  

I guess there's nothing like that now, really.  Nothing to leaving Sunday night hanging there in suspended animation.  Well then, I guess I'll go to bed.