For me, Sunday is the loneliest day of the week. I am not alone on Sundays: My wife and dog keep me company on walks, on trips to the grocery store, in cooking, listening to music, and ending our day before the fire, in winter, watching Masterpiece Mystery.
It seems I should be content. I should feel warm, cozy, free from fear or dread or loneliness. That train whistle I hear at 10 pm on these nights should comfort me. But train whistles themselves are lonely sounds. They make me think about being far away.
Where did these feelings begin, and how have I been scarred by this otherwise restful day of the week?
I remember that Sunday night when I was nine, riding in the back seat with my brother as my father drove the family home from visiting our grandmother. The argument escalated before I understood how long it had been going on or what it was about.
“Why don’t you just move back in with your mother?” my mom said. “That’s where you’re the happiest.”
I felt my father’s rage, though he didn’t respond. My mother slumped against the passenger door, the handle jamming into her side. I watched the shadowy trees pass and feared that nothing would ever be the same. Which of us felt more alone on that Sunday night in late fall?
I think my Sunday fears were caused by my parents showing me how lost they were to each other.
Even before that, Sunday loneliness got to me. My earliest memory is being left in the church nursery while my mother attended her adult Sunday school class. I didn’t know why I was being left. I can see myself standing there, the nursery school matron trying to console me while I cried.
I know kids cry when left alone. But I wasn’t alone physically, so was this a psychic wound? And is this why feeling lonely isn’t just a feeling? When someone—your mother, say—assures you she’s coming back soon, should you trust that, always?
I remember my father telling me that when he was six, maybe seven, his mother left him at the movies where for a nickel he could watch the feature, the newsreel, and a cartoon in those early talkie days. But on this Sunday, he got a bad earache and used a payphone on the street to call home for her to come get him. When he called, no one answered, and he stood there in the cold, alone, hurting.
I still wonder if he ever got over his lonely pain, and if, when he decided that his family would always visit his mother on Sundays, he was trying to heal what never could be. He was a lonely sort of man, a real “loner” as my mother described him. I wonder how much of him, his loneliness, is in me.
***
I remember the first time I heard “Sunday Morning Coming Down” : “There’s something about Sunday, makes a body feel alone.”
I didn’t understand the song, didn’t like it much, partly because its rhyme was off, but also because it made me feel so alone. I was only 13 years old, but the lines were being telegraphed into me.
Last Friday, I heard it again; its Sunday echoes felt more alive than ever as I drove in the early morning rain.
Is there a more lonely day or feeling than Sunday, even on a Friday?
***
Sometimes it all comes back to where it started.
When my mother finally returned on those Sunday mornings, as relieved as I was, I understood that this would happen again next week and over and over again. Sundays were destined to be those lost, lonesome days. And now, I think my Sunday fears were caused by my parents having the time and space, even within a closed car, to show me how lost they were to each other.
I’ve tried to make peace with my wounds, but this past Sunday, as I walked my dog through early morning neighborhoods, I saw two cats lying dead. One had been hit by a car, the other taken by some other creature.
I wanted to do something, find the family whose beloved pet had been taken from them. But it was much too early to knock on a door, and it wouldn’t prevent the wounds from coming even if I had stopped.
Even with my wife and dog around me, most of every Sunday I spend alone, writing about my life, attempting to connect with the shadows and ghosts of my past.
I know that I’m a grown man, and many other men would consider me weak, unmanly. I write about these things, too, especially on dreary Sundays like today when I feel so far away from everything. My wife walks toward me.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I’d like to tell her about how deep my loneliness is, but I don’t want to scare her. So I mention some work I have to do, some email I have to write. I think she knows what I’m feeling, anyway.
“Whenever you want to talk, I’m here,” she says.
I would talk to her if I knew what to say, and that’s the paradox. If I could find the words and had the courage to say them, I might not be so lonely.
Instead, I call my brother, our usual Sunday ritual. What I want to ask him tonight is if he remembers that night in the car, our parents arguing in a way they never had before, or at least not in front of us. I want to know if he felt the darkness, if he saw the shadows running across our lives.
But I say none of this, and we simply talk about what we’ve cooked for supper, what we think will happen in next week’s football game, or whether the country will come to its senses and reject Trump.
Even then, I feel better after we talk. He’s my little brother and I think he feels lonely, too, and maybe not just on Sundays. But maybe he feels less so now.
Afterward, my wife and I sit close together and watch the HGTV series “Hometown.” A woman who bottomed out as a drug addict, who lost custody of her two children, is given a new chance—a renovated home in Laurel, MS. My wife holds my hand as we watch. It isn’t everything, and it doesn’t make everything right. But in those last few hours of most of my Sundays, I feel better.
