Southern Saturdays
What? An email from a subscriber list on a Saturday? Yep, and I ain’t even selling anything.
Saturday mornings hit a little different to me. I’ve gone through a lot of stages about Saturday mornings in my life. Most of them probably aren’t that different than yours. I found out recently through some research that Saturdays weren’t always about livin’ for the weekend, it used to be, not so long ago, that Saturday was just another work day. For some, it still is.
First 10-12 years of my life, Saturday was what we would consider a dream life. Up early, bowls of sugary cereal and cartoons, really good old cartoons, until noon. Then, if I was staying at my Granny’s house, it was time for wrestling or Rasslin’ as we called it, from the local TV stations. Names I would later recognize as Hacksaw Dugan, Nature Boy Ric Flair (Wooooooooooooooo!), Iron Sheik and many more.
Some Saturdays, it would be watching the Monkees, my cousins who were girls were all ga ga over that Davey dude. But I like that car they had.
Later in my teen years, Saturdays were wake up sore from a Friday night football game in the fall, and just plain waking up late after making 541 consecutive laps around our town square cruising with the other kids. It was a small town, took about 2 miles to make the lap so I figure in my teen years, I completed over 300 Daytona 500s.
As I got towards the end of my years in the little town, it was go to work on Saturday mornings. I learned early, like most did, that girls and cars are both equally finicky, and expensive. Working a soda fountain in a drug store and being a fetch all for house builders taught me the early work ethic.
Then adulthood hit hard. Military life knows no weekends. It’s on Donkey Kong all the time. I was assigned to active duty Navy squadrons that managed and trained reservist, so that one weekend a month and two weeks a year they sold them on meant working weekends for me and the other active duty guys and girls.
That sucked when I was single, puts a real damper on weekend night life in your early 20s. Not that it stopped me from living through 8 of the 9 lives I apparently was blessed with at birth when God must have thought i was a cat.
But after getting married and having our son, having Mondays and Tuesdays off turned out to be a real blessing. My wife was a full time Mom so we could run errands without the crowds and when we decided to go do fun things, beaches and parks and movie theaters were essentially all ours!
Later on, Saturdays turned into waking up at dawn at some campsite with Scouts, ready to herd cats (boys) in the woods and battlefields and mountains for the day, then eating campfire cooked food and watching what we called Boy Scout cable, watching the crackling fire. Probably need more of that.
Now I’m at the stage of life that weekends are weekends, I am back to getting up early, not to rush for the cereal bowl but because I have to pee. Saturdays are still days for errands, chores and some relaxing time. We should be grateful that we don’t have the mandated 6 or 7 day work weeks anymore and we have time to enjoy our lives.
And nothing says that even in our older years, we can’t grab that bowl, that box of flakes or pops, the milk and a spoon and stream some Bugs and Elmer!
Enjoy your weekend, y’all.
Remember, you can’t be too Southern.
Bourbon and Biscuits