Such a magical thought for much of the civilized world. Those with Monday through Friday jobs anyway.
“Remember that weekend we . . .”
Yeah, if you live long enough you utter that phrase and for most people it is that phrase. The “we” is important. A shared life experience. It will be much more magical for the teller than the other participants, but it will be a shared memory. Something to be cherished more because of who you were with and the time spent together than the actual event. This is one part of life Millenials have latched onto with gusto. Opting to rent, moving city to city with work, always spending the weekend with friends taking in new experiences.
“Remember that weekend he finally got her, the girl he’d been pining away for?”
That used to be a phrase uttered often in later years by the older culture. The relentless pursuit of a dream girl and the weekend it became a reality and reality didn’t have a prayer of living up to the dream. You’ve all experienced a version of it, perhaps not with the dream person, but with that one special gift you absolutely had to have for your birthday and when you got it you learned it was a cheaply made piece of shit you ended up hiding in your closet because you couldn’t get away with throwing it out. While the older generation might utter such a statement amongst their closest friends, they won’t utter it loudly in the #MeToo era. Even if the couple got married and raised a family, odds are they are divorced now. Either way, those once cherished memories have to disappear in the mists of time. Even if you recall them fully, when asked you must say
“That was so long ago, who remembers?”
For the writer “that weekend” rarely has a “we” in it. Not the really special ones. It’s the weekend you were trapped at an airport with your laptop and managed to get a seat near a power outlet. There you banged out that short story or finished off a novel which elevated your status and made the starving days more worth while. Sometimes it is that weekend when the weather was so wretched outside you got out of bed, stumbled to the keyboard and words flowed. A trickle at first, like ice melting in a creek, but soon they were spilling like water over Niagra Falls. When you finally rose from your chair joints you didn’t know you had cracked like they were playing billiards. You crawled off to bed with nearly a hundred fresh pages and you knew they were good. They would survive those early brutal rounds of editing. You had written down where the story was going because you finally knew and you knew it would get done in just a few more days. That weekend where the dream of finally finishing one of your books became a reality. That weekend when you vowed, after this one was off to the editor you would mine the slush pile of other books partially written then abandoned because now you knew what it took to finish them. That weekend you really became a writer.
Sometimes it is that weekend where you dutifully bought provisions ahead of a major snow storm and then right as it got bad realized you had forgotten to buy toilet paper. You realize this because you just put the last roll on. Do you eat nothing and hope for the best? Do you venture out with your car knowing full well at least two somebodies will hit you because nobody should be driving in this? How many people live in this complex? Could they all be out of toilet paper and shuffling over to the club house to avoid the high stakes trip to the store?
That weekend, which wouldn’t be a shared event. It definitely wouldn’t be as funny if it was. That weekend where, because of a writer’s mind, you can explore the human conditions most primal thoughts and turn a brain fart into a story others chuckle at, remembering their own brain fart weekend and the misery they endured.
Many tales of the Norman Rockwell era involve a housewife going next door to borrow a cup of sugar or salt because they were baking and realized they were out.
Would you go next door to borrow a roll of toilet paper?
Do you think they would want it back?
