“The city takes a breath on Sunday. Of all that’s lost with the pursuit of what’s next, I hope we don’t lose that…”
The morning is warmer than I expected. The sky is overcast with light grey clouds. Here we are in January and it is 45˚, still sweatshirt weather.
It is time to finish Christmas. The living room decorations and the trees are the only signs of Christmas left. I was waiting for Little Christmas before I tackled the trees. I have a plan, a deconstructing Christmas plan. I’m going to bring up the bins, fill them and then pile them in the dining room for Skip to take down to the cellar. I’m going to cover the little pine tree and have it ready for the cellar. The real tree I’ll cover for Skip to take outside. My house, once Christmas is gone, always looks empty and dark.
When I was a kid, my mother took off all the tree lights and ornaments when we were in school. The tree was there in the morning and gone by the afternoon.
I still have an old time Sunday state of mind. When I was a kid, nothing was open on Sunday except the red store, known only by color, not by name. It had piles of Sunday papers on the sidewalk in front overseen by a kid collecting money. My father for some reason never had the Sunday paper delivered even though the rest of the week was so he’d stop and buy one. We got dressed up for church and wore our Sunday clothes which meant a dress or skirt for me and a hat or a mantilla or a piece of Kleenex if I had nothing else. We had a family dinner Sunday afternoon except in the summer. The dinner was always special and never any form of hamburger, a common meal the rest of the week. We had mashed potatoes and a few canned vegetables. TV families had bread on the table, not special bread but just ordinary pieces of white bread. We never did. I don’t remember napkins. I think we bought our plates to the counter by the sink. My mother did the dishes. She’d wash them and they’d dry in the rack. We’d stay around the rest of the day and watch TV, read or play in the cellar. Sunday was a quiet day, the only one.
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January 6, 2019 at 1:55 pm
Hi Kat,
When I was a kid in Dallas, Sunday around my house began by going with my dad to his bowling league. There was a very large bowling alley called the Cotton Bowling Palace. The palace part included a large section of pinball machines which occupied my time while my father bowled. The League was sponsored by a Jewish organization called B’nai B’rith and that’s why they played on Sunday mornings.
After lunch we either played outside, watched some TV or read books because my father sat at the dining room table and did his paperwork from the previous week. He rarely watched sports on TV because this was before the Cowboys existed. In the first couple of years after the Cowboys came into the NFL we also had an AFL team called the Dallas Texans. Both teams would draw flies in the Cotton Bowl so the owner of the Cowboys, Clinton Murchison and the owner of the Texans, Lamar Hunt flipped a coin to determine which team would leave town. Hunt lost the coin toss and moved the team to Kansas City and they became the Chiefs. Eventually the two leagues merged and Lamar Hunt supposedly coined the term ‘Super Bowl’. The bowling alley had a Texan ticket office and gave away seats as prizes for various high bowling scores of league players. I got to see several AFL games while they still played here. We were among the couple of thousand spectators in the 75,000 seat Cotton Bowl.
Sunday dinner was always going out to eat. We rotated between the few ethnic restaurants at the time. Chinese, Italian or Deli were the only choices. Dallas was a vast wasteland of ethnic cusine in those days. Chinese was always fun because the waitresses were American and mispronounced the names of the dishes. They all looked like the character ‘Flow’ from TV, chewed gum and asked if we wanted white bread with our Egg Fo Young. 🙂
Clear skies again but breezy with a high in the low 70s.
January 6, 2019 at 10:34 pm
Hi Bob,
No bowling for us. I don’t even think the alleys were open. The movie theater didn’t have a Sunday matinee. Everything was closed except the churches and the red store.
We pretty much did the same things after dinner. My father watched football in the afternoon in the living room. We didn’t care one way or the other.
I had no idea of the history, the lineage of the Chiefs. I know more about baseball’s nomads. The Patriots always played in and around Boston at first, but I never got to see them. I think my father may have gone. No such luck in getting tickets as prizes.
We almost never went out to eat. It was expensive for my dad. I do remember going to Kitty’s Restaurant in the next town. It was mostly Italian food and a good portion for the money. Once in a while we’d have Chinese from the China Moon where all the waiters were Chinese from Boston’s Chinatown. They were brought to my town every day in vans.
Today stayed cloudy and got colder toward late afternoon. It will e colder the next few days.
January 6, 2019 at 2:47 pm
We’ve had a rather pleasant and foggy day here, it’ll change on Tuesday when they say snow will fall and cold weather comes in. I really liked this mild winter so I can’t pretend I’ll like the change.
Our Sundays were just a day free from work and we rarely had anything special for dinner unless we went to my grandparents, then we could have steak or something similar. We almost never had hamburgers any day so that would have been special to get on any day to be honest 🙂
Have a great day!
Christer.
January 6, 2019 at 10:44 pm
Christer,
We’ll have cold weather starting tomorrow, more like winter cold. The nights will get even colder. No snow here yet.
We only had hamburgers on the grill in the summer. The rest of the year my mother made meatloaf, marinara sauce, American chop suey and so much more. All she needed was ground beef to make her magic.
Have a great day!
January 6, 2019 at 3:13 pm
Hi Kat,
That sounds like Sundays at my house all through childhood. Except for the part about bringing the dishes to the counter. My mother cleared the table and then designated dish washer and dish dryer. I preferred to wash as that meant I would be done first and out in front of the TV leaving my unfortunate brother behind to finish the drying. Once he figured that out, there were arguments over who got to wash. Eventually my mother decided that she would rather do it herself as it gave her some quiet time alone. 🙂
My Christmas wreath is still on the outside door.
Today is cloudy and sunny and cloudy. It’s warmish for January but the wind takes some of that away.
Enjoy the day.
January 6, 2019 at 10:57 pm
Hi Caryn,
Seldom did we do the dishes but had we, I too would chosen washing for the same reason. I don’t know how long before my brother would catch on.
My tree is stripped of lights and ornaments and is sitting in the living room. Everything else Christmas is put away in boxes which are piled in the kitchen. I’ll have Skip take them downstairs. It is always sad to put Christmas away.
The weather was the same here. The cold is coming.
Have a great day!