In praise of Mondays

I was driving across town this morning, and like just about everyone else driving across town, I had the radio on in my car.

"A happy Monday to you," the deejay intoned. Then added, "if that's not an oxymoron."

We're all supposed to hate Monday. There's a song called Blue Monday. Garfield the Cat famously hates Mondays (and I've always wondered why, since he doesn't have a job.)

But I just put my finger on the key to the cultural vilification of Mondays: the secret woid, as Groucho Marx would have said, is "Job."

If this is true, (and it is) it points up a very sad state of affairs. The whole notion of "Blue Monday" is tied up with the idea that we all hate our jobs, or at least, hate to work. Monday is unpopular because it represents the beginning of the five-day work week, the "grind." Friday is the nirvana we all seek; Wednesday is "hump day" because, once you get past 12 noon on Wednesday, you're more than halfway to Friday.

Stop and think about this for a minute. Most of us spend 30-or-so years of our lives engaged in regular, day-to-day employment. That's almost half your time on earth. Five-sevenths of that 30 years is going to be workdays, vacations and holidays excepted. One-seventh of it is going to be Mondays. And if, as many believe, this life is it, the one you get, what's the point of dreading one-seventh of it?

These days, at age 50, I find that I rather like Mondays. Yes, I hated and dreaded Mondays as a kid because Monday meant back to school. I hated and dreaded the month of September for the same reason. But I have reversed my position on both. Now I tend to look more favorably on Mondays than I did throughout my school days, and the month of September, well, that means the beginning of fall, which, as I grew up, became something more to anticipate than dread. We learn to take longer views when we get older. As a small child, I thought of September only in terms of summer-vacation-is-over. In adolescence I came to regard it as the gateway to the holiday season, and by the way, my birthday is in October, which sweetened the autumn breeze further.

Right up until I graduated from college, Monday was such a dreaded thing to me that I would usually become melancholy on Sunday night, as I saw it looming. It had simply always been that way. Monday was a day with no redeeming qualities unless you happened to like Little House On The Prairie, which aired on NBC Monday nights at 8:00.

But when I was in my second year of college, I made a friend at school. Her name was Lucia. Lucia was an adult student--at the time we became acquainted, she had three children aged 16, 14 and 12, and her husband was a Navy officer. She lived close to the campus, and so decided to start taking college-level classes for something to do. (She got her Master's degree a few years later, and I still don't have mine.)

While by no means a saccharine, make-you-cringe optimist, Lucia had a way of making the best of situations. One afternoon when we had an hour or so to kill between classes, she invited me over to her house for lunch. She fixed me a sandwich and poured me a beer, which was a treat because I was 19 and not yet old enough to legally drink beer. Her kitchen was a quiet and cheerful place, in the middle of a very tidy suburban home. And as we ate and talked, Lucia gave me a perspective on Mondays that was utterly new and novel to a 19 year-old school-hater for whom the words "Saturday afternoon" meant heaven and "Monday morning" was an invitation to thoughts of suicide.

"I like Monday," Lucia said. "Especially Monday morning."

"Why, for God's sake?" I asked.

"Are you kidding? On Monday morning everyone clears out. My husband goes back to the office, the kids go back to school, and I can just pour a cup of coffee, sit down by myself and enjoy the peace and quiet."

Well, I hadn't thought of that, and why should I have? I mean, what reason was there for me to be familiar with the viewpoint of a 40 year-old wife and mother to whom weekends meant a houseful of teenagers and not, as they did to me, 48 hours of delicious, no-responsibility fooling around?

It made me stop and think. There was another way to view Mondays than the way I always had.

Now that I'm a decade older than Lucia was the day she served me that lunch, and even though I never raised teenagers, I'm coming around to viewing Mondays pretty much the way she did.

I've never especially cared for Sundays. I know there are people for whom Sunday is their favorite day: regular churchgoers like it, as do people who enjoy loafing around sipping coffee and reading the Sunday paper all day.

But for me, and again this is a prejudice that goes back to childhood, Sunday was always the mortuary of the week. My family were not churchgoers, except for my mother, who went to church because she was employed there as an organist. So Sunday lacked that ritual. Also, on Sunday most businesses were closed, much more so than today anyway, and worst of all for a kid growing up in that largely pre-cable era, Sunday was the day when there was nothing decent on TV. Saturday morning meant cartoons; Sunday morning meant boring religious shows. Sunday afternoon was likewise a TV wasteland, and it led inevitably into Sunday night, which meant early bedtime because of school the next day. Yuck.

I've carried this over into adulthood. School is no longer an issue, nor is TV. But Sundays remain a trial for me, the weekly re-enactment in miniature of the dog days of August, when you just start wishing the autumn breezes would begin to blow, and life start moving again. I know the idea behind the sabbath is that it's supposed to be a day of rest. But I'm going to have a nice, long rest when I'm dead. Why should I have a preview of it every week?

Viewed that way, Mondays aren't so bad. I go out into the street on Monday morning and what I see is the world returned to its ordinary-time self: businesses open. Trucks making deliveries. The mailman scooting around. The guy across the street sanding the side of his house, getting ready to paint it.

I once had a job where I worked weekends, with Friday and Monday my days off. That was cool, to be able to go out on Monday and ride my bike around when everyone else was in their offices.


And some businesses do this of course. Since Sunday is traditionally the busiest day of the week in the restaurant business, some small restaurants close on Mondays and make that their day off.

Still hate and dread Mondays? Here are some suggestions:

1. Find another job. if what you do is getting you down to the point where you dread the start of the work week, maybe you should take direct action.

2. Make Monday the day of a pleasant ritual. Start regularly going to a favorite luncheon spot on Mondays. Or meeting with friends for drinks after work. Or make Monday the day you habitually knock off early. Make up for it by working a little extra on a couple of other days.

3. Move to a country where Monday is the sabbath.

4. Adopt the Julian calendar.

Or you could go into the restaurant business. Which reminds me of one of my favorite classic TV-comedy moments: in an episode of Get Smart, the late Don Adams goes into a French restaurant. This is one of the most oft-repeated gags in sitcom history: the American who makes a fool of himself in a French restaurant because he can't understand the menu. Remember Lucy and the escargots? Well, in this case, not wanting to tip off the waiter to his ignorance of French, Maxwell Smart points to "Ferme le lundi" at the bottom of the menu card and says, "I'll have that."

"But monsieur--"

"Look, that's what I want. I'll have that."

"Very good, monsieur. One order of 'Closed on Mondays.' "

I don't know what kind of sauce the French would put on that, but I'll bet it would be good.