Sometimes something about a Sunday morning jumps out and sticks with you. Sometimes it’s a great article in the Tribune and sometimes it’s the absence of a line at the grocery store and sometimes it’s finding that long forgotten twenty in your jacket pocket when you’re sorting laundry. It’s not usually a big thing, just a little something that carries you through the day and effectively blows away that nearly unavoidable, if unspoken, feeling of ‘Well, back to it tomorrow’ that’s hovering around your head making you think about how weekends just don’t last long enough before you have to go back to work.
I had a Sunday like that yesterday. Before I go into that, I should say that I honestly and completely like my job, and would even go so far as to say I love it. When I think about what comprises my day I have to wonder if it’s even legal that I get an actual paycheck for doing it. I get to dress up. I have an excuse for those impulsive accessory and jewelry purchases (they’re work tools, we’re supposed to accessorize, it makes an impression) and I don’t have to wait for a special occasion once or twice a year to put my hair in some fancy bun that would never be at home in a cubicle in some dull, gray office. Rather than fielding such challenges all day as, say, huddling over a computer crunching numbers (I’ve done this and it’s not fun) I’m more apt to be consulting on menus, talking about décor, and taking people out to eat. Not exactly something to dislike or feel stress about, although because I am human and somewhat of a professional perfectionist and serious control freak (requisites for my field) I manage to find a way to do just that and usually on Sunday when I allow myself to muse (albeit vaguely, and in the back of my head) about the fact that the weekend isn’t lasting long enough and tomorrow I’ll have to go back to work.
Walking with Basil yesterday morning, my Sunday Something jumped out at me in the form of Claudia, my French neighbor (I could listen to her talk for hours. She could swear at someone and it would sound beautiful), who was walking her Jack Russell, Bloss, and it wasn’t long before she launched into her own tale of angst about work. Which, oddly enough, completely and totally blew mine away.
“I’m looking,” she said, “for the perfect black shirt. A dress shirt. What do you think? Where should I look?”
“Macy’s,” I said, because Macy’s has always been my answer for everything and because they’ve never let me down I assume with all confidence they’ll have just what she’s looking for. “Special occasion?”
“New office location,” she said. “I have lots of blouses, but they’re too…” she gestured vaguely at her chest in a way a person the chest belongs to can do without issue, but should a different person, say a male person, attempt would probably send him away with a bodily injury to a very private area, “revealing. I do not think it would be appropriate to be around these new inductees with my boobs hanging out.”
Inductees.
There was my something.
Just thinking about it, I was hit with a rush of appreciation for the fact that the biggest challenge on my plate in the morning, no pun intended, was finalizing a few menus and deciding whether or not there would be a dance band or a DJ for the Saturday event. You see, while those are the challenges I deal with every day (and am occasionally ridiculous enough to stress over), as a parole officer Claudia is dealing with child molesters, repeat drunk drivers, spouse abusers, rapists, your basic con men (and women) and the occasional bank robber. Listening to her talk, it seemed she had appointments with all of them, and to make it worse – no proper blouse. You’ll have to trust me on this when I say that was a real crisis.
“I have to wear a different uniform,” she went on. “These dress pants,” she said, emphasizing ‘pants’ as if she’d said ‘cholera’ or perhaps ‘the plague’. “I really need to go shopping and I just don’t want to, it’s too nice a day.”
I couldn’t have agreed more. Which is why, just then, I remembered a cream colored dress blouse with gold and black enamel buttons I hadn’t worn in months, which was probably hanging right next to a blue silk blouse I was lukewarm about at best but which would be really striking with her eyes, a red jacket, a beige jacket, and three navy blue blouses that had probably never left the hanger since taking up residence in my closet. All, I knew, would fit Claudia, and would certainly keep anything from unduly ‘hanging out’.
“You know,” I said then, “I have a few things I’d love to find a home for, work stuff that I just don’t wear,” and with that, the problem was solved (which is something else I like to do, occupational hazard, you know). So I went home and ten minutes later was standing in her living room, armload of blouses and jackets, and she was ecstatic. She loved everything.
“This is great!” she said, emerging from her bedroom with a black blouse she’d bought a few months back that just ‘didn’t fit right’ on her, a nice way of acknowledging that while I bought my blouses large, she bought hers to fit, so clearly I might enjoy this one and certainly have no fear of anything ‘hanging out’, let alone, come to think of it, being even discernible. I was equally happy with it, deciding I loved the fabric and couldn’t wait to put it on. Which I did, and wore it to dinner that night, which was another Sunday Something that jumped out at me.
While I was supposed to be listening to dinner conversation, I was really thinking, idly glancing at my shirt sleeve, that if the blouse I was wearing could talk, it could probably tell me a lot about life behind bars, how to hold up a convenience store, how to break into a house and maybe even how it was turning its life around….or trying to. My blouses, by contrast, could probably only hold forth briefly about the merits of baby carrots over newborn asparagus, and whether hollandaise was déclassé or just overdone.
I thought then, having the more exciting blouse, I’d gotten the better end of the deal, especially because I’d never been the one to actually have worn it when those conversations took place. It occurred to me that I simply couldn’t do Claudia’s job. It occurred to me that I was very glad someone else could, and it occurred to me that the next time I complained about how some people just couldn’t decide on a color scheme or decided to lose sleep over the size of a section of staging, I’d take a look at that blouse and tell myself to stop being an idiot.
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