This past Sunday was a fairly quiet day. That’s not particularly unusual these days. The Broncos played — and, shockingly, won — on Thursday, but I turned football on in the background anyway and spent a lot of the day coloring pretty pictures from my coloring app reading.

At some point, I had a great idea. I invited Bill’s kids and grandkids to come for dinner. Well, obviously not Heather, though how fun would that have been if they could have come! But Dave and Jll and their kids, and Allen and Emma. To my surprise, given the late notice, they accepted. Only Dagny represented the adolescent group, but she did a bang-up job re-pre-sen-tin.

Since I quit working hard for my money, Sunday, frankly, isn’t that much different than any other day of the week. I mark it in my mind by going to church. These days, we try to go to Mass live; however, since space is limited, we try to only go every other week or so in order to give others a chance to attend. But when we aren’t going to live Mass, I watch Mass from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC on iPad, so Sunday still offers a meaningful beginning to the week.

I began thinking about what we used to do on Sundays when I was a kid. Sunday was the only day of the week that the bakery was closed. Of course, Dad still had to go into the shop in the evening after supper to set the sponge for the next day, but it was for the most part his day off. So Sunday was the day we would often get in the car and drive somewhere.

This somewhere might be to one of our aunts’ or uncles’ houses for noon dinner. They lived so far away that we could only see them on special occasions. I’m being facetious because most of my aunts and uncles lived somewhere within an hour’s drive from us. But in those days, an hour — 65 miles — was a Big Deal. Nowadays I might drive 50 miles on a regular day. Back then, it was rare to drive that much in a week, at least in Columbus, Nebraska.

While the stores were closed on Sunday for shopping in Columbus, the malls in Omaha were open. If we were in need of new clothes, or Christmas was coming, we might go to the big city. Or if How the West Was Won was coming out in technicolor and Cinerama at the Big Theater in Omaha, we might pile in the car and take a road trip.

Bill says that when he was a kid, Sundays were the days that his mom and dad would gather up the kids and drive from their home in Chicago to his mom’s parents’ home in Hobart, Indiana. There, Bill’s grandmother would serve a noon dinner featuring fried chicken and all of the fixins’. Bill’s dad Rex would spend the afternoon doing odds and ends around his in-laws’ house.

I think COVID reminded everyone for a while that Sundays are days of rest. That didn’t last long, I’m afraid. Unfortunately, now that people are back at work — even if that work is at home — Sundays seem to be the days for grocery shopping and trips to Home Depot. I went to the grocery store yesterday morning, and the cupboards were as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s.

Still, I do think that Sundays seem to be family days. I see a lot of moms and dads riding bikes with their kids around our neighborhood. I know Court often tries to take his family on day trips on Sunday. And there’s just something relaxing about the sound of football.

It’s nice to have a family Sunday.