The Everyday-ness of Everyday

There is a song by Sondheim which talks about all the people coming off a train and mingling with all the hundreds of other people so that they are indistinguishable from all the people that were there before them...and even after them. Sometimes the days are like that. Each day is the same as the day before that and the day that comes after is the same. The weather changes somewhat, sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy. But the days progress one after another in a straight line on into the future. When you have reached a level of some proficiency in your job and your job is essentially the same every day, then the sameness bleeds into the hours and the days and the weeks and oh-my-heavens the years before you even know it.

I went to pick up the hubby at the train station today and I realized that the previous days had seemed to be like a carbon copy of the previous week and the same of the week before.

The plants need to be watered, the cat needs to be fed, the dishes are fed dirtily into the dishwasher only to be revived again after they are cleaned to be put on the shelf to be made dirty again. Cycle after cycle after cycle. The sun unfolds sleepily in the morning and droops back into the horizon at evening. And it was morning and it was evening...that's from Genesis.

I'm not going to talk about the surprise of each new day in this post. Because I didn't feel it today. I do some days. Some days I am astonished at the variety of life and experiences all around me. But not today. Today I'm looking forward to falling into bed to be awakened by the grudging grayness of another morning. And another hundred people just got off of the train, and the plane and the bus.

Room at the top

I remember the slanted ceilings of the old house. The house wasn't a "dutch colonial", but it had those ceilings anyway. Why didn't I put more posters on them? Why didn't I decorate them more? I have no idea. I can't remember my thought processes from those times. Except, once in a while, I get a glimpse of what I was thinking. I'll see the light bend a certain way, or the leaves on a tree through a window and remember how it was to see that every morning when I woke up. To look out the narrow window out front and see the maple trees, see the way the light shone through the branches in the winter or the leaves in the summer. And the slanted ceilings, sliding away to the small walls where the beds reside. In the back bedroom, the beds were put so that the head was perpendicular to the slant, but in the front bedroom, they were parallel, so the ceiling gave you a sense of enclosing you. In the front bedroom you couldn't look out the windows, but the back bedroom you could. The front bedroom had the fan, that if you talked into while it was running, your voice would get all wavery. The air almost never circulated all the way to the back bedroom. No one ever heard of air conditioning back then. It was sleep and sweat all the way.

I don't know what made me think of that upstairs, but I did. Slanted ceilings, twin beds, four children, so long ago.