Sundays can be despicable. You wake up. The sun streams through your window at you. It’s as if the day is standing just outside your bedroom, screaming; “It’s a beautiful day, do something exceptional, make the most of it, seize it, do it, make it worthwhile, live, live, live!”
Ugh.
Funny how seize and cease are so similar and so different. I almost wrote ‘cease it’ in that opening paragraph.
Which is what I sometimes prefer doing, on those perfect, despicable Sundays. I want to turn the day off. I want to do nothing, not worry about squandering a beautiful day by reading a book indoors, or spilling drivel onto a page, taking a nap or reading internet articles that make me feel inadequate.
And why is doing any of these, on a beautiful sunny day, considered some kind of loss or waste? Does it have to do with tan I’m missing out on? Or is it all the vitamin ‘D’ that I’m squandering? Are these things I should feel guilty about?
Thing is, I know the answer.
It’s a day lost because there might be so many things I want to do, and on the day I want to do them, it might be raining; so I should do them now. I should get out there, use the sun, the absence of clouds, the existence of sunscreen, and do all those things that rain would ravage.
There’s always the beach
As a family we’ve been to the beach so many times this summer that my daughter is growing gills and my son can hold his breath for a couple of hours.
I’m not afraid to tell you that sitting on sand that’s so hot that you can cook a full English breakfast on it, while hearing every word of the conversation the couple next to you are having because they decided to set up their fucking CoolCabana so close to you that you’re sitting in its shade, doesn’t really resemble what I consider a fully lived day.
And then there’s the part where I’m standing, waving your arms frantically at my son, who can’t swim, screaming at him, “come in closer, the water must be under your nipples… NO! UNDER YOUR NIPPLES!” while he slowly drifts off with the current, somehow unable to heed my cautions all the while staring down at his chest and he holds his forefingers over said nipples.
And then it gets too hot, and I go in for a swim
I get up, run for the cool water. Sweat is trickling down my sides, I can feel my bald head is almost fully baked – skin-cancer-ready despite the Santa Cruz bucket hat I wore since we arrived. I’m probably too old to wear a Santa Cruz bucket hat, but I don’t know for sure yet. Still waiting for someone to say something.
And as the cool water soothes my burning skin like a frigid tongue, my children come to me. Doggy paddling, sunscreen slippery, hydroelectric water babies hollering with excitement that I’m there. And we play. I toss them around like sharks toss seals off the Cape coast. They ask me to watch them while they do some arbitrary thing, like splashing me in the face, or kicking one another under the water.
And when I get out, they hold onto my ankles, trying to get me to stay for one more throw, one more ‘look what I can do, dad,’ handstand.
And today is Sunday, and it was another one of those perfect, despicable Sundays
The sun, the fact that we live in Sydney, the sea, the all of it, it was all there, at my window, taunting me as I blinked and calculated how long it would be before I could bring a cup of coffee up to my lips.
“What are we going to do today?” I couldn’t make it to the coffee machine before my son dove onto the bed, his knee finding my left testicle.
“Sophie! Come give daddy cuddles!” he screamed, with his morning breath, into my face. My daughter joined us, another knee, another testicle, another expectant face.
As I said, another perfect day.
I’m up. My wife, Jane, she’s an early riser. I’m not. That’s why our marriage works. I drank coffee and we discussed at length what our options were for this horrid, perfect Sunday. We decided early on in our deliberations the beach is out. The gills on my daughter’s neck are growing unsightly. And my son’s breath holding is impacting our sleep. Hearing your son take a breath and then hold it for so long you eventually panic, run to his room, shake him awake at 2:00 in the morning, shouting, “breathe goddammit, breathe” stops being charming after the first night.
So we went to Balmain, not the beach. We stopped at NĂștie Donuts and bought the most decadent donuts you’ve ever seen; and headed down to the jetty at Snails Bay. The donuts made us happy and sticky, our dog barked at another dog splashing in the water next to us, we admired the Sydney Harbour Bridge ‘from the wrong side’ and discussed how lucky we were and how good life is. And how these might be the best donuts we’d ever had.
But it wasn’t really the donuts that made the donuts so amazing. It was the perfect, despicable, un-squandered Sunday that made the donuts so amazing.