As a child Sunday evening meant the resumption of school and children are perhaps even more keenly aware of the declining moments of freedom than their elders. There were only a few more hours as the day darkened.The morning would bring arithmetic and the variegated rhetorics of adult enforcement and certainly by the age of 9 or 10 a kid knows the dolorous shadows caste by the prospects of the upcoming week.
These days I think of the unemployed who have no structure and for whom such nostalgic sensibilities would undoubtedly be lost. Who can dread the coming week’s worth of schools or hjobs when homelessness and humiliations are all around and with no end in sight?
Anyone of us will take the coming week with its humdrum and structured inconveniences. We count ourselves lucky to have this old Sunday feeling and to know the value of feeling. Our jobs (those of us who still have them) remain larger than our employments. We work for the larger community around us and try as best we can to serve our neighbors. The days are hard in America just now. Very hard.
When I hear a politician say, “Let’s just let the banks fail,” I wonder what strange brew he or she has been nipping.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 