Since I retired, I’ve noticed an unusual phenomenon: I find myself looking forward to Friday, and when it arrives I feel a kind of contentment that lasts until Sunday, when I start to have anxiety about looming responsibilities. As I explained a few months ago,
…since none of the jobs I had after 1987 had traditional Saturday-Sunday weekends, that inability to feel free of looming responsibilities eventually seeped into every day off, aggravating my lifelong characteristic inability to relax into a lifelong Sunday-shaped pathology: unless I was actually under the influence of a drug, whatever tasks I might have to accomplish were always lurking behind me, impossible to ignore regardless of my efforts to pretend they weren’t there. But now, five years into my retirement, I’m at last starting to have a little success in convincing myself that there really aren’t any obligations haunting my free time…
When I wrote that I hadn’t really begun to notice the Friday effect yet, but over the summer it became quite pronounced. Sure, as a child I looked forward to Fridays, not only because I’d have a few days off from the dreaded school and could look forward to Saturday morning cartoons, but also because almost until my early teens I spent many Friday evenings sleeping over at Maman‘s house. In my teens Saturday became D&D day, another good reason to look forward to the weekend, and around 1980 (I think) the local PBS station started playing classic horror movies late Friday night; a few years later they started running Third Doctor episodes of Doctor Who on Friday nights (the Fourth Doctor was on Saturday nights). Then in the early ’90s, while I was a librarian, Fridays became D&D day for a year or so. But that was over 30 years ago, and I honestly can’t recall anything special about Fridays since then, except maybe a few Sci-fi channel shows of the late ’90s and early Oughts; during all my escorting years, Friday was just like any other day, and I can’t recall and special memories of Grace associated with the day.
And yet, the feeling of Friday as somehow special persists, and if anything is slowly growing more pronounced. I have no explanation for this, other than the strange persistence of emotional memories, but it’s not an unpleasant association. So I’m just going to enjoy it, and accept it as a strange and wonderful little blessing from the deep recesses of my brain.
