WELCOME TO BIFOCAL FRIDAYS

I recently started a new job in a formal business setting after 20 years of working in a very independent environment. I absolutely love my new gig, but it does require a pretty unwavering commitment to a solid 9-5 schedule every day, with a generous but very structured vacation policy. I miss some of the flexibility I had before, to take a day or an afternoon or a few hours off at the drop of a hat.

So imagine my delight a few months into the job when I learned that we keep “Summer Hours” for the months of June, July and August. That means Friday afternoons entirely off. I felt like a kid in a candy store as I considered the unexpected gift of this special time suddenly available to me.

It reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, The Saturdays, by Elizabeth Enright, which I have read countless times. In 1940s New York City, the four fictional Melendy children lament that their weekly allowance of 50 cents each isn’t enough to do anything really good with. So they decide to pool their money, and one child will have it all each week in turn, to do something special for a Saturday adventure.

Ten year-old Randy gets to go first, because it was her idea. As she luxuriates in considering her options, she thinks she mustn’t waste a minute or a penny of it. “It was like a door opening into an enchanted country which nobody had ever seen before; all her own to do with as she liked.” This is how I felt about the idea of my Summer Hours. While mine wasn’t an issue of limited spending money, the idea of not wasting a single minute of it was paramount. So I made the decision to approach my Friday afternoons very intentionally, committed to making each one count in a unique and meaningful way, all summer long.

As the Melendy’s father said when he granted approval to their scheme, “See that you do something you really want; something you’ll always remember. Don’t waste your Saturdays on unimportant things.” I wouldn’t waste my precious Friday afternoons. I would do something wonderful (or at least notable) every week, and write about it here so I’d be accountable to the commitment and fully mindful of the adventure.

Of course not every Friday will pan out as some big amazing thing. Maybe one afternoon I will simply clean my house and revel in the fact that I have this lovely home with a new love who has given me a new lease on life in my 50s. Maybe one day I will simply weed the garden and think about life. But there’s plenty to be gotten from that as well.

“We lead a humdrum life when I think about it. It’s funny how it doesn’t seem humdrum,” said Randy Melendy over tea with an old family friend. Mrs. Oliphant replied, “That’s because you have ‘eyes the better to see with, my dear’ and ‘ears the better to hear with.’ Nobody who has them and uses them is likely to find life humdrum very often. Even when they have to use bifocal lenses, like me.”

Join me on my “Summer Hours: Bifocal Fridays” adventures. Maybe you’ll find something new to do with your special time, or just a new way of looking at things.

Friday #4: June 24, 2016

Coffee & Books
This week I had not only Friday afternoon off, but the whole day! I took a few extra hours of vacation time to stretch this particular Bifocal Friday out to the fullest. Drew left at the crack of dawn to take his daughter to register for college classes, and none of the other many teenagers of our household happened to be around, so that left me with the whole quiet house to myself – something that hasn’t happened very often in the three months since we launched our Blended Family Circus.

I slept in shamelessly until 9:30, and then moved out to the patio to enjoy my morning coffee and consider the stack of new books I’d bought the day before. I’d gone to the campus bookstore in search of something I didn’t find, but came home with several other unexpected volumes instead.

I’ve always been interested in the work of Masters and Johnson, but never did catch the HBO show that was made about them, and I just finished writing a big proposal about the University of Minnesota’s Program in Human Sexuality for work, so Masters of Sex caught my eye.

 Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee came naturally to me as I’m a devotee of To Kill a Mockingbird and one of the few people I know who truly enjoyed and appreciated Go Set a Watchman as well.

 Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn I bought as a gift for an old childhood friend of mine who recently ditched townie life and moved to a farm in northern Michigan with her partner. I figured I’d take a quick read through it before I mailed it off to her, and I thoroughly enjoyed it myself. I won’t be setting fencepost, raising goats, slaughtering chickens, or training a llama to herd my sheep any time soon, though.

Drew and I met Heidi Arneson at a gathering the other night where friends were casually presenting new pieces of creative work. She calls her just-published first novel Interlocking Monsters a “suburban-Gothic road-trip thriller” and she blew us away with her reading – if you could call it a reading, because she didn’t actually read from the book but simply laid it down and launched into absolutely riveting storytelling mode. She’s well-known around town as a writer, painter and performer (a “many-armed troublemaker,” she says) but I’d never met her before. She completely lit up the room and we rushed to buy a copy of the book from her. Drew started reading it first this weekend, so I can’t report on it yet, but he says it’s great so far.

Polishing Up

Poking around the kitchen after my coffee, I saw that I hadn’t finished putting away the silverware from a dinner party we had recently. I decided to get out the silver polish and give it some loving before I put it back in its cozy old felt-lined wooden case. It was my Grandma Grath’s silver, and polishing it makes me happy and calm. I think of standing together at her sink in St. Clair, Michigan, cleaning up after one of her infamous poorly-cooked but well-meant meals. She would wash and I would rinse and dry as we looked out the window to the big backyard with its crab apple tree and its wild grape vines. I love to use the silver (and her pretty, silver-rimmed china dishes) for any semi-special occasion, and as I put everything away I reveled in the fact that in my new home with Drew, I once again have a nice dining room to gather friends and family around the table for a big meal.


Beach Boys

The plan for the afternoon was for Jack and me to join up with three of his best friends and their moms for a day at the beach. We went out near Stillwater to Square Lake, which is one of the cleanest, clearest lakes in Minnesota. Bit of a further drive than any of our city neighborhood beaches, but worth the drive for the water quality and the peace and quiet. 


Well, I guess peace and quiet is a relative term when you’re with 13 and 14 year-old boys. These guys are a wonderful crew, though. They have so much fun together, and they’re still teetering on the right side of being Too Cool. Today they leapt and jumped and flipped and swam and barked like otters playing in the water, and I just wanted to hold them all in my mind’s eye like that for a little longer. The afternoon stretched on into early evening, and the sun was lowering over the lake before we finally packed up our chips and our cherry pits and our sandwich crumbs and drove home against the long June sunset.




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