Sundays at home

Sundays at home are my most cherished luxury. It's a tradition I learned in childhood, when my parents would eschew any event or plan or outing in favor of staying home on Sundays and taking it easy.

They still do that so I come by it honestly. My mami always had a way of making Sundays special. I remember how she would cook fabulously tasty Italian dishes on Sundays. I especially recall her manicotti with ricotta cheese (or what I now think must have been ricotta), which were spectacular.

Sundays also was the day for all five of us to watch TV together. I recall the not-very-exciting evenings of watching operas in the little black and white TV in the back first-floor room of our house behind the hospital.

Sundays also was the day for Masterpiece Theater, which taught me most of the English I knew up to the time I went to college at 16. As I've mentioned before, Allistair Cooke's accent did a lot for my subconscious amor of English accents.

And Sunday was also the day for the National Geographic specials, which I looked forward to with almost as much anticipation as Christmas. The specials were always thrilling and I still remember the music associated with them and the ads for the company of furgones which underwrote the program in Puerto Rico.

Sundays nowadays is the day my parents order "take out" from their favorite seafood restaurant located on a busy city street, near their apartment. My mami calls in their choices (they know the menu by heart) and picks it up and I delight in hearing what they had for lunch when we talk on the phone. I know it's delicious, since I've been to the restaurant, so I can enjoy their lunch vicariously.

Sundays also is the day when I talk to my parents on the phone and has been so since I left home for college. That Sunday tradition has remained basically uninterrupted for nearly 30 years.

Thanks to my parents' example, I know how to enjoy a lazy Sunday. Not that I've been lazy, mind you, since I'm almost constitutionally incapable of that. But the pace of my Sundays is much slower and less agenda-driven than my weekdays, or even Saturdays.

Today, I walked the dogs in the late morning, cooked myself a good breakfast of scrambled eggs (which I never do), worked on my dissertation, cleaned the upstairs of the house, took a short nap, read several dissertation-related materials, read all the newspapers for last week and for today, and cooked myself a quick and surprisingly delicious Trader Joe's chicken burger before I cooked my hard-working husband a black bean frittata. The poor man spent the day away from home doing work-work at a motorcycle event.

Thus, it's not like I had a lazy Sunday. But, like most Sundays, I did what I did at a lower speed and led more by what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, rather than by I had to get done by a particular time.

I do so love my Sundays at home. I'm glad I decided to postpone for tomorrow the several errands I have to do before returning to the college on the hill this week. Slowing down isn't something I'm good at, but Sundays always give me the best excuse to get better at it.