My Saturday Feeling

Posted on 04.21.08 2:08PM under The Everglades Room

I want every day to be Saturday. It’s the first day of the weekend, when it’s natural to feel entitled to an unburdening from whatever happened during the week. For me, it’s always been better than Sunday, with work or school looming on the horizon, telling me my free time is running out. Only that rarest of rare birds, the cheery-throated warbler (every family has one), seems immune to Sunday afternoon’s bittersweet monitoring of sands running out in the hourglass, managing to act as if it’s been just turned over. Then again, maybe I’m just a crank.

On a Saturday, I’ve escaped from one workweek and I’m not yet looking at the next. It’s then I’ve got my best chance of recapturing the sense of infinite time I had as a kid. You know, that “I can sit here and play in the mud, because there’s nothing I need to do that I can’t do later and there’s time to do everything,” feeling. I think only kids experience it and they all deserve to enjoy it, that innate sense of infinite time, time enough to do anything, mess it up, do it over again, get it right, try something different, end up someplace unexpected and have an adventure getting home.

But once it’s gone, it’s gone, except for the odd cameo appearance, sometimes triggered by strong drink that also ends it in a cascade of broken glass and curses. Fighting a holding action well into adulthood, I went for years without a watch, only to realize I couldn’t fool the hourglass in my grown-up head. Somewhere along the line, our limitations of ability, opportunity and mortality overpower this most wonderful aspect of innocence.

It doesn’t help that decades of zooming along our minds’ neural pathways wears grooves in them that steer us in familiar directions. Mine look like the worn marble steps of a back staircase at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which I discovered when running from guards chasing my brother and me for taking photos we weren’t supposed to take. So struck by the fact that feet could defeat stone, I stopped and stood staring at the hollowed-out steps before me. Did I mention getting caught? That’s not to find fault with ancient marble staircases in cathedrals. On the same trip, I marked much deeper grooves in rough stone steps leading me through the heart of dankness, spiraling to the top of the Tower of London. Many of those footprints were made on one-way trips.

Mondays have loomed over my Sundays since at least college, when I projected these meanings onto “My Sunday Feeling,” from the first Jethro Tull album (the only one with the great Mick Abrahams on guitar). As dark as their songs were, however, I just checked the lyrics and it looks like they were only singing about a hangover, not mortality or even going back to work. But wait! Two albums later, they recorded “A Time for Everything,” which tells the story of a fellow who once thought there was, but now concludes there isn’t.

Let’s face it. In any era, making it to Saturday is reason enough to celebrate, whether you survived the boss or a saber-toothed tiger to get there. And, in order to really enjoy it, you might try conjuring up your childhood sense of infinite time and drawing it out from its hiding place. I’d suggest sitting and splashing in the mud for a few hours. You’ve earned it, especially after one of those weeks when every day felt like Monday.

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Alan H. Rolnick has practiced law in Miami for twenty years and has appeared in numerous high-profile cases. His first novel, Landmark Status, received such ecstatic reviews he wondered if his publicist had scandalous pictures of the reviewers in her safe. Alan consults on legal matters for the entertainment industry, provides trenchant social commentary in any medium, and is Executive Producer of the independent film Canvas. To learn more, visit www.alanrolnick.com or e-mail alan@alanrolnick.com.

 

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