Open Writing

When I was a child, the days of the week were hardly identifiable, with the exception of Sunday and Monday. There were just bad days and good days. The bad ones were Sunday to Thursday when I was at church or in junior school. I was in school on Friday too, but Friday afternoon was “Story Time,” and some of my teachers were extraordinary storytellers.

Mrs. Fowler stood out from the rest. Not only was she a good reader, but she was able to dramatize her reading – and she knew how to pick a story that would electrify us. For her, “Story Time” was a tool to control her class. If we got out of line, or didn’t do well collectively on a test, there was always the threat of “No story time until you improve.” I don’t remember that she ever carried out her threat.

Sunday was my blackest day. From early morning until mid-afternoon in the winter, I was a reluctant chorister at church. It was wartime, and impossible to black out the church, so the services were compressed between 8.00am and 3.00pm, with Sunday school in the middle. Church was too far from home to walk back and forth, so I stayed the whole day.

After I stopped singing in my twelfth year, Sundays weren’t much better. I was confined to the house, like most children in the neighborhood, so entertainment was either board games like Snakes and Ladders, a book or the radio. The BBC’s Sunday radio programming at that time was primarily church services, perhaps a discussion group and the news. The highlight of Easter Sunday was a passion play!

The BBC’s lightest Sunday fare was an hour of string quartet music, broadcast from the Pavilion at the Royal Hotel in Scarborough; exciting stuff for a twelve-year-old. Every retail establishment was closed, public transportation schedules were severely curtailed and ended in the early evening. The thought of returning to school the following day hung over me like pall.

In adulthood, all my days were clearly defined, so it was rare for me to ask what day it was. Sundays were a tad better than before because I had the autonomy to do whatever I wished within the confines of what was available, though the choices were still meager by today’s standards. But at least I could take a walk or go on a picnic, or listen to a pirate radio station that played pop music.

The pall of anticipating school the next day was replaced by the same feeling about my job, which misguided parents and inept school counselors had coerced me into. Retail establishments were still closing, and public transportation schedules were not exactly liberal.

When I came to America as a forty-year-old, I left behind a very different England in terms of what Sunday choices were available, but my life in America topped that. Many people went to church, but once that was out of the way it was open season on shopping, playing or watching sports, backyard barbecues, restaurants and bars that stayed open all day, and of course there now was TV.

Therefore, some of the Sunday blight was lifted, though occasionally I had to leave for a business trip to some distant part of America or to England, which took the shine off the day. I have to say that Saturday was my favorite. There were projects to do around the house and garden at my own pace and choosing, a chance to sleep late or not, afternoons by the pool, and a chance to get together with neighbors and swap stories about the experiences of our individual weeks. Sheer pleasure!

Once retired, I had to reassess my days. It was a soft transition from my corporate life to that of a freelance writer working at home, but required a new discipline. At first there was a temptation just to keep on working until the assignment was done. I found myself writing seven days a week and quickly became burned out with it. I finally trained myself to set aside free time, or at the very least break up the day with other activities.

Differentiating the days was not difficult. Saturday and Sunday was when my wife, who was still working, was around, and the telephone didn’t ring. In the summer, we spent those days on our sailboat. Friday was grocery shopping, and Monday though Thursday was punctuated by calls from my editor, and deadlines.

Now that I do very little, paid freelance writing, I’m back once again to asking what day it is, but now it’s my wife that answers, that is if she knows. Sundays are once again my bête noir. There’s no stock exchange on which to follow the fortunes of our pension, no mail to bring in at 3.00pm, and the Web news I monitor is pretty much a regurgitation of Saturday’s news. Ah well! At least I’m not required to sit in church all day.

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