Sunday (sigh)

I think I need a new strategy. It’s always been hard for me to be alone on Sunday afternoons, probably because they were such a special family time when I was growing up. Lunch was always (and still is) a big home-cooked meal, more like dinner. And afterwards, a drive out to the country to visit my uncles (country then, suburbs now), or to Dundalk to see Aunt Mary and Uncle George, who would give us Cokes (!). Sometimes my Dad and I would just drive down to the waterfront in Baltimore and look at the big ships; once I remember we walked all around the deck of an old abandoned freighter, God knows how we got onto it. Of course, they were safer, less barbed-wire times then. And sometimes we’d make the long drive out to Finksburg to visit Detzinka and Streetchek, on their real farm, at the end of a long dirt road that wound past a tiny cemetery plot. It had cold running water and a wood-fired stove and a nice flower garden and apple orchard and black walnut trees. Detzinka, who then must have been in her 70s and smelled of earth and fire and sweat, would kill copperheads with a spade. (Odd that I ended up living in Finksburg for a time; I remember house-hunting there, and feeling the spot where that farm used to be, a hint of the stream and ridge and a grassy road I remembered, but more than that, a spirit, probably Detzinka herself tapping me on the shoulder.) The road, 140, to that farm was the same we would sometimes take to Gettysburg, and in either case there was a stop at Twin Kiss for soft ice cream and homemade root beer in frosted glass mugs. And Sunday night was always pizza from Gil’s, except when it was corned beef sandwiches if Dad and I were downtown and stopped on Lombard Street; he had his favorites, this deli for bread, that for pickles, and another for the corned beef.

Nowadays, it’s as often as not a long, lonesome ride home from the old house in Overlea after lunch on Sundays. But I’m happy to still have that tradition, that sense of family, if only for a short hour each week. And I’m sure glad the dogs are here when I get home.