Saturday Morning

Everything felt different because it was Saturday. I lived with my husband then, a medical student, in a basement apartment at the edge of a Chicago suburb, and worked in an office downtown, and nothing about my life resembled the life wanted. To be fair, I couldn’t have told you what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t this. Nevertheless, Saturday morning blossomed with a different kind of light. The day was unstructured and made no demands of me. I didn’t have to board the train and go to work, and that fact alone was exhilarating. I stepped outside and wandered. I wore a tiny pair of wooden shoes pinned to the lapel of my coat, and these I imagined were symbols of journeys I might one day take. Sometimes I might pedal along on an old bicycle that my husband had bought me, used, for ten dollars. I named the bicycle Gretel, because I was a person who named things, and I could barely ride, but the clunky contraption somewhat expanded my radius and shifted my perspective, as bicycles do to this day.

And even today, everything feels different because it is Saturday, even now in this long blur of nonspecific days in which we are afloat, all of it rendered hazy by pandemic-caused isolation and cancellations, and it makes no sense, but I knew it was Saturday as soon as I opened my eyes.  I long ago extricated myself from work, and folks called it retirement, but in truth, I simply quit. I soon became irrelevant, a condition that is both scary and liberating. My duties are optional, the menu of possibilities is for me to arrange, and I have regular access to that Saturday space of my twenties again. No school, no work, no obligations…how did I manage to land here? I’m a lucky old lady, not lonely or lacking anymore, and although theoretically every day could be Saturday now, an actual Saturday still feels distinct from the others. It’s an old ingrained pattern, I suppose, and there’s something about the light, and I can’t explain it any further than that, but I’m experiencing it right now.

Saturdays. Except for the period during high school when I worked as a cashier in the supermarket, Saturdays belonged to me. In childhood, they might mean going to the park with my siblings, the frisky gang of us, frolicking like puppies, and that was a happy part of those years. I can still hear children shouting and laughing inside the very word, “Saturday.”  Later, during the Chicago era, when I felt mostly the lack of things, the unscripted blankness was appealing, and I could fill in the voids and pretend to be going someplace. Maybe I’d have an errand: a paycheck to deposit, a bag of laundry, some item from the grocery store called Jewel.

And now another Saturday unfurls before me. I think I shall putter. There is always a closet to clean and hair to be swept off the floor. The lupines I planted are lasciviously in bloom and I want to bend over them and marvel. I shall weed and water and pretend to be a gardener. I am going to roast a chicken and take a day off from the news (because I’m one of the privileged who can do that, and I’m not proud of it, but neither do I feel compelled to walk on nails), and I’ve been meaning to write a letter to a brother faraway. My best friend-partner-husband intends to go look at the ocean, and I will tag along with him and turn it into a walk.