Dearest Rachel –
I think you might remember me telling you back in the day how odd it was that, once I was able to retire, I only ever had to set my alarm on Sunday mornings. Of course, that’s to be understood; when we volunteer to work at all three services on a given weekend, we didn’t want to take the chance that we might not be able to wake up organically for the early one on Sunday. With your departure, and the lack of any, ah, activities we might engage in on a day like today (although back then, I would often find myself waiting for you to wake up for a few hours), my turning to a men’s Bible study in the relatively early hours of a Saturday means that I’m having to set the alarm on both weekend days, despite not having to do so any other day of the week.
It seems ironic that life has been flipped on its head like that, honey. More ironic still, is that I found myself awake before the alarm was to ring – by less than five minutes. Needless to say, I didn’t bother to wait for it. I simply shut it off, and set about getting myself ready for the morning.
As I did, I considered how it hadn’t always been like I remember. Not every Saturday morning was spent in each other’s arms (such as your last, more’s the pity). Years earlier, I would often wake up at the usual weekday time on Saturdays – which generally translated to maybe only three or four hours after you’d surrendered to the sandman, and gone to bed, so I could know that you (and Daniel, for that matter) would be asleep for at least another three or four to come. I would drive off to work, and take care of some tasks that I hadn’t had time to during the course of the week – and between closing the books, assembling financial reports and filling out monthly tax forms, there was almost always something left to do, and Saturday mornings were good for doing them without interruption, or worse. Once I’d taken care of a sufficient amount of work – or it passed nine o’clock, when you might be expected to begin making your way toward consciousness – I would close up, and drive home.
And here’s where I may have made the mistake of creating a Saturday morning routine. As a peace offering for not having been there when either of you woke up, I would stop at a McDonald’s barely a mile from home, as pick up breakfast for us all. Usually, I would call before I left the office, to take your order, but eventually, I knew exactly what each of you wanted – an Egg McMuffin for you, and a McSkillet (later, when they discontinued it, much to his disappointment, a couple regular breakfast burritos) and a mocha for Daniel (later occasionally replaced by their pineapple/mango smoothie, when it was available) – and didn’t need to bother, although I still made a point to call from my desk, just to let you know when I was on my way.
Eventually, my office stopped allowing people to come in to work on the weekends, for security purposes. It balanced out, though, since this was after the merger with our larger sister company in Detroit, and some of that workload I was always trying to catch up with was taken over by the team there (Mohinder, however, looked at these changes as a threat by them to completely eliminate our department eventually, due to redundancy, despite all claims on their part to the contrary – and this was when he started to become tyrannical. But I digress). So I began to stay home much more often on a Saturday – and we got to enjoy that much more time together, as you might remember.
But once a habit is started, it becomes difficult to let go; besides, one does need to eat from time to time, and Daniel would wake up hungry, being a growing teenage boy. He wasn’t necessarily ready to abandon those Saturday morning breakfasts. So there were some days that we found ourselves rushing through our time together in order to make it to the McDonald’s before they stopped serving breakfast… which we didn’t always manage to do, I might add. Hey, if you keep track of time while you’re relaxing, you’re not really relaxing. Sometimes, we would stop at the local Mexican place for chorizo con huevos, and once one came to the area, we would occasionally drive up to Sonic for a breakfast burrito at any time of the day. Of course, the real game-changer was when Mickey D’s decided to do breakfast any time, so we no longer had to rush out on Saturday’s at all – a benefit that was lost with the pandemic, and never came back, that I know of.
Not that it really matters. Since the accident, he hasn’t wanted anything from McDonald’s at all – not even when I went to pick up that one last McRib the other day. Even the coffee no longer appeals to him. Too many old memories, he’s told me – that, and the coffee has certain, erm, effects on his digestive system, apparently. All of which is fine, as I rarely go past the old place much anymore, now that I never have to drive to that old office again.
But I am out in the mornings these Saturdays, and I’m coming home at about the same time as I used to when would put in a few hours at the office. And for whatever reason, I find myself thinking that I still need to bring some sort of peace offering for being away and leaving him home alone (not that he really seems to mind, as I do that most weekdays already, and it’s not as if it’s my fault that you’re no longer there for him to hang out with. But still…) So, what’s to be done?
Well, you’ll recall that, as he began to shun coffee (which must have pleased you to some extent – your dislike of the stuff never got to the point that you forbade it, but between your refusal to even taste it and your loathing to let food or drink go to waste, I know you were horribly torn about those occasions when he couldn’t finish his drink), he started developing a taste for mango smoothies. And it just so happened that a place opened up about a year before the pandemic barely a block out of the way home from church. So, that’s what I do most of the time on Saturday mornings these days. Calorically speaking, it’s practically a meal in itself, and he gets some fruit in him when I can rarely get him to eat much more than that in any given day.
There’s a part of me that feels like I shouldn’t habituate him to this – because I’m repeating the same mistake (if you could call it that) I made with McDonald’s back in the day. But at the same time, I want him to be happy, and this seems to help in the mornings – and it’s better for him than all that used to be. It’s not as if I’m interrupting ‘our’ time together anymore, and if I find ‘Megumi’ and we decide to have some time to each other, he’s able to do this for himself if he wants going forward. But that’s so far in the future at this point, it might as well not be a thing, wouldn’t you agree?
Anyway, that’s what’s been going on here, honey; hope it amuses you to remember how things were, and compare them to how they are now. Keep an eye on us, and wish us luck. We’re going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 