Sunday Morning

And I'm dutifully browsing The New York Times's website. And getting a little bored, actually. Evidently we're distracted by technology, and losing our ability to focus—an extremely able journalist has written a book saying so. Aha! Maureen Dowd makes passing note of celebrity divorces and then passes along marriage advice from some priest about how you basically shouldn't marry a jerk. Fair enough. (I'm not bothering to link to that one.) Then the Pulitzer-winner Russell Baker has a piece disinterred from 1990 about how he doesn't like fireworks. Well, fine, Russ. You don't like fireworks, you don't like fireworks.

I don't know. I'm waiting for someone to surprise and delight me, to say something I don't know, to be something other than a master of the bleedin' obvious. I used to observe the ritual, going out for fresh bread and the paper making coffee and spreading marmalade and disassembling the Sunday Times. But I don't remember leaping up from the table and saying, "Aha! Now I have the missing piece of information for which I was searching!" What I remember was more a kind of placid sabbatical leisure, a recognition that Sunday morning was a time of contemplation, even for complacent agnostics like myself. The coffee was like wine, the marmaladed baguette a wafer, the various sections you opened up in sequence a sort of ritual passage through a secular service at the end of which you felt vaguely refreshed, caught up, ready for the week ahead.

I really don't remember information nuggets having much to do with it at all. So I'm going to do an experiment: I'll put the computer to sleep, go downstairs, make another cup of coffee, spread some marmalade, and go out on the porch. Perhaps if I sit there, just eating and drinking and thinking quietly to myself, this Sunday morning will unfold itself slowly, like a flower. I think that's really what I want.