Sunday Morning

...And it took me back to somethin',
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way ...

There's this great Kris Kristofferson song that Johnny Cash sings about sunday mornings. My dad used to play it while he made bacon and eggs for breakfast after nine o'clock mass. He used to lay johnny cash and roy orbison. Whenever I hear "pretty Woman" my first thought is never about julia roberts and richard gere, it is always and will always be about the snap-sizzle of bacon in the frying pan and the warm runny centers of over-easy eggs, and my dad.

And there's this one, Sunday Morning Coming Down, i think its called, and it breaks my heart and gives me this tentative hopeful feeling everytime I hear it. I guess its about a guy who drinks and does drugs alot, which always made it weird that my strait-laced dad liked it so much (having no tolerance at all for those types of people), and now its Sunday morning and he's walking off a hangover, looking in family windows and feeling lonely.

He hears church singing and sees people living their lives and he is so terribly isolated, "because there's something 'bout a sunday, that makes a body feel alone..."

Sunday breakfasts stopped for us after michelle got pregnant and dad disowned her. We still went to mass every sunday, for a while anyway-- til I was confirmed, so several years-- but the family breakfasts petered off and so did the Roy and the Johnny.

I can't hear johnny cash without feeling warm and safe and happy, even if its the saddest damn song (long black veil being one of my top favorite folk songs of all time, weep weep weep, sob sob sob; oh, and how about a story song with a big reveal huh? that song's all: OH DAMN!!!!). And all my siblings own at least johnny and roy's greatest hits. We all have that strange nostalgia, that peculiar longing for a time we can't ever go back to or hope to recreate.

Where michelle would ask for no yolks and sharon would pretend like she liked the bacon, and danny would make us all laugh with some crazy face or silly joke, where we had two dogs and a cat who sat patiently waiting for scraps, where the house was filled with the smell of frying bacon and cigarettes and underscored by the low baritone of johnny cash.

Instant coffee crystals and mismatched servingware and generic supermarket orange juice and the way he'd wrap the bacon in the paper towels and tinfoil to keep them warm and leech out excess grease. The requisite jelly doughnut and mine with choclate frosting and sprinkles; the St. Margaret's parish bulletin that my mother had assembled, the worn sofa, the jelly-jar juice cups.

The feeling that it would always be this way.

I guess now there's something about sunday mornings that always makes me feel alone too. Even if Aaron makes me eggs and toast with butter&jelly and those beautiful abominations that I love so much: potatoes from a can (oh christ yes, they're fabulous). Even if I play johnny on my laptop and even if I'm happy, there's something that will always be empty and dead and missing.

I don't attend mass anymore and don't quite consider myself catholic. I miss the music but not the mysoginy.

I'm now a vegetarian. I miss the bacon.

And we don't smoke or even drink coffee really. I don't miss the smoke on a concious level, that yellowing, choking, sour-ish cigarette smoke that permeates and strangles. But sometimes its weird to eat eggs without that cigarette-smoke side-dish.

And I'm an adult now. With my own place and my own little family of a husband and cats. And I miss the reardons. Michelle, sharon, danny, mum, dad and me. and the brown & ornage afghan on the back of the raggedy couch. And the particle-board dining room table and the too-numerous figurines of clowns in the shadow box, and the popcorn ceilings and the avocado stove and the made-to-order eggs and the "pretty woman" and "the boy named sue" and my dad snapping his fingers and splashing bacon fat onto eggs to give them that crispy, delicious finish.

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin' at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
'n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken.
And it took me back to somethin',
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin'.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down.