How Sunday Should Be

Last Sunday, I slept in, for me at least. I woke up around 11:30 or noon, read some political blogs, sports blogs, online news magazines, and the hilarious comments on okayplayer (a site I've been lurking at for 6 years now). After about an hour, I finally got out of bed and made myself two bowls of Honey Nut Scooters, the two dollar bagged generic brand of Honey Nut Cheerios that are even better than the real kind. As I was eating, I accompanied my thoughts by reading a bit of Jane Eyre, a classic that somehow slipped past me during my schooling days. I took a shower, got dressed, and then walked to the living room to survey my apartment. The cd of 70's Ethiopian music I bought the day before was on the table- I put it into my combo record/cd/tape player and the horns drowned out the sounds of the street below me.

And then I started to clean. I cleaned the living room, picked up our various belongings off the rug, I windexed all three glass tables (is it me or are glass tables SOOO 70's). I swept our hardwood floors and placed everything more or less neatly on the computer table. I cleaned the kitchen, did the dishes, wiped the countertops, swept the floor, took out the trash, tried in vain to make the burners spotless. I cleaned the bathroom- we all know what that entails. And I did it all to an Ethiopian Groove; East African funk with horns that dripped like honey and a guitar that scratched and skatted like the best of Louie Armstrong.
It took me back to my memories of Sunday at home. Back to laying in bed and hearing Bob Marley's Natural Mystic escape from my mother's stereo. The bass; di-doom-doom-doom, di-doom-doom-doom, di-doom-dee-doom, di-doom-dee-doom, would slip through the cracks of me and my brothers bedroom door like light shards. Like a steam whistle for millworkers, it signaled it was time to get up, and more importantly, it was time to start cleaning. We'd clean through the entire Exodus album, putting only cursory effort into our assignments while unsupervised; frantic in our efforts to catch up when our mom stepped into the bathroom. We'd stretch out a simple task like cleaning the sink to unimaginable lengths. When we were younger, my brother and I would use the opportunity to extend our on-going pretend world in real-life instead of toy form. As we got older, we'd talk about girls and sports and how we imagined our lives turning out.
She'd put in something different, War or Bobby "Blue" Bland, the music started to blend together really. Jazz and old soul and blues, light enough to carry us through the day- by the end it sounded like music at the end of a movie, the main plot had been resolved and only a few loose ends needed to be tied together. We finished our room, finished the bathroom, finished the living room, finished the kitchen, just needed to do the dining room. Our focus started to drift though and our breaks got longer; by the end my mom was resigned to tie up those loose ends herself. My head was filled with relief that it was over. With a slight sense of accomplishment and thoughts of catching a few Nicktoons. And finally there was just a twinge of dread, because Sunday today meant Monday tomorrow, and Monday tomorrow meant school. And I'd lay down on the couch with all of these feelings crowding my head as I turned on the TV. And smelling like a combination of dirt, Windex, and 409, I'd laugh with my brother and sometimes my sister and watch Doug or Roundhouse or even NickNews before it was time to go to bed.

I'm not a religious man. Usually, when people say that they're not religious they usually follow that up with "but I am spiritual," in order to not look like some kind of devil-worshipping, soulless heathen. The problem is, that I'm also not particularly spiritual either. My mother told me more than once that I needed to pay attention to my spiritual life, a moment to reflect on my own limitations as a human being. I haven't been to church in I don't know how long and I don't know when I'll ever go. The thing is though, I use to be an altar boy and I love the pagaentry and borderline mysticism of the Catholic church, but I never felt as spiritual as I did while cleaning my apartment last Sunday. The situation and the music brought back so many memories and in turn it made me think about how I got to where I am today, the decisions I made right or wrong. It gave me an opportunity to think about ways to be a better man, a better person. Like a random wikipedia search, my thoughts always snowball from the relatively mundane things, like what I should cook for dinner (baked chicken that day) to cosmological questions about what it means to be human and what are our obligations to each other if we are truly just an accident of space, time, and a few molecules getting together in a primordial ooze that was struck by a bolt of lightning. I don't know why it's cleaning that makes me delve deeper into those thoughts than I normally would; but I do know that the process always, the late afternoon, the task at hand, always feels how Sunday should be (although I don't dread Mondays anymore). Or maybe its just the 409 fumes. Either way it's really all the same.