If you have the misfortune of waking alone in your bed on a Sunday morning, yet you are a reader and not prone to going to church, then you have the good fortune to dawdle over the New York Times Sunday Book Review while drinking your coffee. After that, you pick up a good book and read. The words always come prettier on Sunday mornings.
I once had a girlfriend, let’s call her A, (in fact, the woman I left my wife for), and she always had to meet two of her friends for Sunday breakfast. I would leave with her on Sunday mornings and glance longingly at the Sunday Book Review lying on the table unread. I knew that it would not work between us. And it didn’t.
B and I would wake at about the same time on Sunday mornings. We would eat a light breakfast, drink coffee, and read the Sunday paper together. Then I would pick up a book. Good, quiet, domestic moments.
V sleeps late on Sundays. I would rise long before her and read. Occasionally, I would set my book down and gaze at her dozing quietly. I wondered at my good fortune: being there with her like that, my heart full to the brim.
Books are always great to take with you when you go out on Saturday afternoons. I walked into the bar yesterday afternoon and was fated to sit next to a very attractive younger woman. I pulled a chess book from my bag and began studying it. When I put it down, she said, you play chess. And thus began a delightful extended chat while I plied her with Maker’s Mark whiskey shots until she had to totter off to her hotel room for a nap before going to work at five. I am sure she realized after she woke that things get out of hand in a hurry when you are drinking whiskey with me.
I could go on forever writing about books, and Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings with girlfriends or the occasional woman who did not mind spending Saturday night with me, but it seems a trifle inconsequential. Yet if it is inconsequential, it still marks part of my life and the feeling of what happened.
Besides, I have to pick up my book again.
