Tuesday is the most poetic day of the week. It should go without saying that that’s especially true for rainy Tuesdays in March. This is a sunny day in January in a town I often find lacking in poetic splendor all year round, so staying awake at all involves a lot of soul-wide-open searching for anything to get aroused about, or we might as well all just close that magic inner eye and take a nice little nap that lasts another year or so. An office cubicle might as well be an ingeniously created antidote to any line of thinking approaching sublime, and the daily grind is doubtlessly a government plot to dull our sense of senseless beauty, but no one ever said finding magnificence in the mundane was easy.
In a perfect world, Tuesday is the day that people come into school or work late, because the mornings are spent in introspection while digging ravines in your oatmeal with the tip of your spoon or while watching a ladybug crawl across a windowsill. Lovers meet in cafes and not say a word after hello, instead only looking off into the rafters and dream of all they’ve got to live for, until their eyes meet again, finding it. Old men saunter down the street tapping a stick against wooden fences, only pausing for the necessary time it takes to skip around a small boy coming the opposite direction, doing the same. The time for school and work does come of course, but the necessary part of the day goes by in a pastel way, as if the true, sharper colors of Monday and Wednesday don’t apply. Even the coldest mid-winter Tuesdays are wrapped in velvet, the snow crunches under the feet in different notes with each step, and the shape of a ghost that your breath makes in the air celebrates before it disperses. Tuesday evenings in this world aren’t for staying out late, they’re for accidental naps that end in surprise to discover the sun has set, and for the sound the boiling water in the iron makes when it’s brought to the upright position away from the clothes it’s pressing, and for wondering if you’ve really never noticed that crack in the wall above the front door before.
I feel bad for people who only see weekdays as five little necessary evils that must be faced, tackled and gotten through before the almighty weekend. Saturday has its obvious allure, but doesn’t it lack in a kind of subtlety? The thrills of a Tuesday are of a special variety, like finding change in between the couch cushions when the craving for a candy bar hits, or the sun breaking through the clouds just as the girl you have a crush on rounds the corner. Anyone can see the brilliance of a Friday night or a Sunday morning; the best thing about the best things about Tuesday is that they’re so hard to see.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
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1 comment:
that's beautiful.
I love tuesdays.
I made them my one free day, my own day.
I guess that was last year. but they are still mine.
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