Sunday night in my house

It's Sunday night. Gabe's being put to bed by Middle Daughter. They make a prank call to Oldest Daughter at college.

When she answers, Gabe says, "You were good kid, real good, but as long as I'm around, you'll always be second best, see?" Then he hangs up. (He's memorized large segments of the movie The Mask, and doesn't realize he's quoting whoever Jim Carrey is quoting -- in this case, Edward G. Robinson, I'm pretty sure, but I need Danny's help to name the film.)

Middle Daughter stays up late into the night doing homework. She takes meds for her ADD that make it impossible for her to sleep -- but hey, who cares: she's getting straight A's (in everything except Dance, that is)! Her ability to concentrate, however pharmaceutical its origins, has changed her entire life. The only part that's really whacked out is her sleep cycle.

Gabe lies in our bed, pretending to work on a Sudoku puzzle but really focusing on his usual pre-sleep ritual: an improvised, highly exaggerated and usually scatalogical aria sung in a pretty impressive 10-year-old tenor. Over his glissandos, The One True Wife is talking about a writing exercise she has to do for an online novel-writing class -- she has to build a story around the idea of a coffin-building competition in Ghana. Do I have any ideas . . . ?

I have a stack of New Yorker magazines next to my bed: the week's bed-time reading. My reading stack looks part yeshiva, part discard bin at a newsstand. The Wife's is stacked with novels: novels for book group, novels for fun, novels for her writing class. (Somehow, she reads about 35 novels a year.)

Sunday is laundry day: The Wife and I (mostly the wife) sort through mountains of laundry that she has done and folded; we put the kids' laundry in their rooms, and put ours away. I have already rinsed a weekend's worth of dishes and run the dishwasher, whose reassuring hum is part of Sunday night's background score. (On Monday morning, I'll empty it while The Wife exercises on the basement treadmill. The harsh boomings of weekday morning news shows jars you right into the weekday routine.)

I try to wrap my thoughts around Monday: I have a job I need to fill; a giant rehab, at Full Circle's newest property, that needs to be done by year end; a property or two to prepare a bid on for Full Circle; and writing work that wants my every spare moment. Even though I make my own hours, and (within certain familial constraints) designed my own job, I look already forward to the long weekend.

But it's the Sunday nights I'll soon miss: the only time of the week when we're all home, all engaged in our parallel play together, throwing a long-distance lifeline to Oldest Daughter, looping her back in; the only time the nest still feels like one.

--T.A.

Comments

[Danny]

Nice reflective post, and since you ask, the line is from "The Cincinnati Kid" when aging poker player Edward G. Robinson says to young whippersnapper Steve McQueen, "You're a good kid. But as long as I'm around, you're second best. You might as well learn to live with it."

[Starry]

Loved this post, David, especially the bit about looping in the astronaut learning to spacewalk.
They'll all be spacewalking soon.

[david]

Starry: All too true! The spacewalk is the perfect analogy, really: neo-umbilical, at once connected and yet removed into vastness. Perhaps we're all spacewalking, all the time . . .