Where did my fun days all go?

So you know how weekends work? Friday afternoon is kind of wonderful, and maybe a little bit chilling. As the work day draws to a close, you're on the verge of beginning a weekend that goes on forever and ever. And it hasn't even started. It's like you've got this wonderful dinner in front of you. And you can't wait to dig in. But there's a delicious appetizer first. And you haven't even started the appetizer. You haven't even had anything to drink. And it's all in front of you.

Now, of course, something could happen to stop you from enjoying the beautiful dinner. Something could always stop nearly everything that's really good and fun, which is why I knock on wood quite a bit (with my right hand only -- one of the few bits of religious dogma that my father passed on to me . . . leading me to believe that perhaps his lack of religiousity when it came to Judaism might have been fed by some kind of deeper faith in paganism) I mean, you could not have your dinner because somebody at the table could pass out. Or you could have left the stove on and smell smoke coming from the kitchen. Or the phone could ring.

Actually, that's why I'll never make baked chicken with breadcrumbs, mashed potatoes and string beans again. That was the meal that was on the table, just before I called Ben, his sister and his mother down to dinner. The phone rang. And about six hours later I was in Connecticut hearing that my father had died. So you shouldn't ever really count on the dinner. Or most certainly the desert.)

But let's say, just for argument sake, that the dinner actually get served. And you eat the appetizer, the main course, the desert and then you've eaten too much and you don't feel very good.

That's how the weekend goes. The last few hours of work on Friday is like sitting at the table waiting to start. Then Friday night is the appetizer. You haven't actually consumed any of the weekend and you're already having a good time. The main course takes you through all day Saturday. Sunday morning begins with the last few bites of the main course (which, if you're me, will be the stuff that you like the best, because you saved it for last. If you're Ben's Mom, it will probably be the thing you liked least because you tended to eat the best stuff first). Then Sunday until about five o'clock is the desert. And then, Monday is just around the corner, just one night away (Ben used to ask, "When will it be tomorrow?" And we'd tell him, "After this night.") And when Monday is ready to pounce on you, like some kind of invisible rabid dog who is about to leap out of the shrubbery and grab you by the neck, it's hard to have much fun. I mean you can pretend the dog's not there. But he is. Or you can get cngrossed in stupid television shows, in which case you forget about the dog until he's even closer to pouncing. But there's no way out.) So, Sunday night is like the unpleasant feeling after eating too much.

Only that metaphor breaks down pretty quickly on slight consideration. When you think about it, Sunday night is probably more like getting up from the table when you're still hungry and know you don't have any more food coming for a while.

The preceding observations about the weekend actually stand in for my attitude toward any stretch of time. We're just finishing winter vacation. Sandy, Ben's sister, is starting school again tomorrow. Ben heads back to college on Tuesday. And Ben's Mom and I have lots of work to do this week.

This vacation was a little better than two weeks long. The first few days (until the first Monday of the vacation) is Friday night. Beautiful and bounteous with no end in sight. Then we were in the Saturday of the vacation until about four days ago. We've been in the Sunday morning of the vacation until a few days ago. And yesterday, just about sundown, we merged into the Sunday night of the vacation. Only in this case, it was a very pleasant night, so I saved up all the unpleasant feelings for today. Ben's Mom and Ben are playing with a car racing set as I write this. And it's hard for me to understand how they can be having fun, when the clock is ticking so loudly that it drowns out the sound of the music (what music? I don't know. But don't let the absence of reality stop a perfectly decent turn of phrase. There must be music someplace that the ticking can drown out.)

So, I think I'm going to try to break free from this totally unproductive approach and go play with Ben and Ben's Mom and the cars, which sound really cool and maybe we can get up some kind of a collection. They're Hot Wheels. I never had Hot Wheels. I did, however, have absolutely the coolest racing cars in the world set up on a table in the cellar of my parents' house and I could spend hours upon hours racing one car against the other. It might have been nice if there had been other kids around, but on the whole I had a great time giving personalities to the cars and enjoying the competition between them. The Batmobile car looked like it would be the fastest, but it was slower than this big (meaning about a sixteenth of an inch longer than the Batmobile) brown vehicle that looked really slow, but was a speed demon and could beat all the other cars, even though they had previously abused him for being too slow to race anybody rather like Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer before he saved the day. Or, at the time. me.

It strikes me that the forgoing is rather a morbid bit of prose, and I suspect that some of you may turn to this corner of the world for a laugh, and I've depived you of that. (By the way, Ben and Ben's Mom are now playing some kind of very cool game with the cars that involves Ben saying, "Motors," then Ben's Mom says, "Motors Away," then there's a sound of cars moving and a crash and they both applaud. Hard to tell from here why the crash provokes a Gomez Adams like response, but it sounds like fun and I've written myself into wanting to join them.)

So, what can I do, without spending much more time, to lighten this thing up a bit?

For lack of anything else, following is a poem I wrote before most people who are 20 years younger than me were born. I don't love it, but at least it doesn't deal with aging or the passing of time:
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Hitchhiking to Saginaw with Mephisto
by Richard Greene

One day while I was visiting in Italy, far from home
I came across a wishing well, in a hidden corner of Rome
I wished the wish that many wish who are in the human race
That I could be transported to some finer, better place
I didn't look so closely at the image 'neath water level
If I had I would have seen a bas relief of the devil
Six times I put in a penny -- no answer, but I'd wish again.
The seventh time it was the charm -- poof -- I found myself in Michigan.

Finishing thoughts

There's a pretty good episode of Seinfeld, in which Jerry confronts a car rental counter clerk who has no cars available to fulfill Jerry's reservation. He points out to her that taking the reservation is really only half the deal. The more important part, he says, is actually having a car.

While I've always thought Seinfeld was a funny show, rarely did it's star's "observational" humor ever go to a topic which I think has such universal application. Everyplace I go (including in my own little house), I see phenomena that reminds me of this Seinfeld episode.

Take bill-paying for example. There are times in my house when hours are spent in the process of something we inaccurately call "paying bills." The truth is that the real activity is simply writing out checks, putting them in envelopes, putting stamps on the envelopes, putting return addresses on the envelopes and sealing the envelopes. Clearly, all this envelope handling isn't quite the same as paying the bills. Paying the bills actually involves mailing the checks.

That might not sound like a profoundly difficult step. But just take a look at our dining room table (not right this second -- we're not expecting company). What will you find there? I'll tell you. You'll find a glass half-filled with water, some vitamins, a fruit bowl with fruit in various stages of ripening and decaying. . . . and you'll find unmailed envelopes containing checks.

Trust me, the nice people from Mastercard differentiate between actually receiving a check and assurances that it is written. Our process doesn't even qualify for the hackneyed "Oh, sorry, the check is in the mail." You just don't get anyplace explaining that the check is on the table next to the vitamins.

This is just one example. Actually, if you had trouble computing that yourself, then you've been skimming. I only say "this is just one example," because it's a way of getting to another example, without having herky-jerky prose. Transitions are always difficult, both in relationships and writing.

And now, in the interest of making an acute statement about transitions, I've blown the last one and there's no good way for me to get to another example of what I was talking about in the first place. I could say "Meanwhile." That word almost always works when I can't come up with some way to get from one thought to another, both in spoken and written prose. In fact, that seems like just the ticket.

Meanwhile, I've taken US Airways quite a bit lately, and I've found that their wonderful little kiosks that give you a boarding pass have the same kind of difficulty differentiating between activity and result. It tells you, after you've swiped your credit card that it is "searching" for your reservation. On the whole, this "searching" process seems like it's none of my business. I don't really want to know that it's searching. I want to know that it's actually "finding" my reservation. Note to US Airways: Please change your kiosk programming to read: "Please wait while I find your reservation."

There's more both from the outside world and my own life. Here's one of each.

From my own life: We seem to have difficulties with manilla envelopes. We use manilla envelopes from time to time (not in any kind of zealous fashion. We are not compulsive users of manilla). Nearly every time we need a manilla envelope, however, there are none to be found. We search for a little bit until Ben's Mom and I have a little fight about it, which is resolved generally with a few moments of tension and then the settling realization that manilla envelopes aren't important enough to either of us to risk disturbing the peace and equanimity we both crave. And then I order more manilla envelopes from Staples.

And here's the disconnect. When I order the envelopes I believe, in my heart, that I have now procured them. Actually, all I've done is ordered them, paid for them, and eventually picked them up from the doorman who doesn't want the box crowding up his little closet. But it's the next step that's problematic. Frankly, I don't know what the next step is. All I know is it doesn't lead to actually having a single damn manilla envelope the next time we need one. Perhaps one of us chronically mistakes manilla envelopes for a dead plant and we throw them away (See "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," for insights into a similar malady). Or perhaps one of us is playing some kind of a joke on the other one. Or perhaps there are night visitors (yikes) who sneak into our apartment for the express purpose of stealing stationery supplies.

Don't know. Only know that this is the same kind of deal.

As for the last real world example, the one that probably give me the greatest level of agitation takes place in restaurants, where the server confuses the ordering of the food with the delivery of the food. If given a choice between these two operations, I'd far rather that someone bring me a random sampler of foods than someone who takes my carefully considered order and then brings nothing to the table for an indeterminate period of time. Once, Ben's Mom and I were in a restaurant where the hungry gap between order and food took so long that we inquired of the restaurant manager, who informed us that, actually, the waiter had quit after taking our order. It seemed odd that nobody else in the restaurant thought about picking up on the waiter's unfinished work. It also troubled me somewhat, not knowing what caused the waiter to quit. I could develop mental images ("Listen, Boss, I'm not going to give those nice folks at Table 3 that fish. It's putrifying.")

In truth, this is just my idea of a funny thing for the waiter to have been saying, that I just came up with right now. Mostly in order to use the word putrifying. I don't recall what we thought at the time, except to hope that the waiter hadn't left on account of something we said.