There’s this mystical aura surrounding Sundays. Probably because of my vivid memories of groaning as I begrudgingly dragged myself out of bed early on Sunday, only to succumb to my mother’s dutiful devotion and head to church. Making my way to bathroom with an oscillating gait, a mixed sense of hopefulness and spite was shaken up by the babble of voices coming from the kitchen. It was the talk of the day. My mother and aunt were comparing their braciole recipes. Even though this had already been discussed the week before, and irregardless of their life-long blood bond, it was incumbent for them to settle on their culinary differences every Sunday morning at approximately 9:30. My mom compensates the sacrilegious, unspoken garlic-ban with tons of pine nuts and cheese, “You know I can’t use garlic in this house”.
My dad would have easily rather chopped his own arm than smelled, tasted or even remotely thought of something garlic-flavored. It was the closest thing to a phobia I’ve ever seen him experience. Years later he got a rare form of cancer in his olfactory gland and was told that his sense of smell and taste would be affected dramatically. Can you guess the only thing he can, unexplainably, still smell? Not flowers, not cat piss, not cologne. Garlic.
“You could make a separate sauce for him, you know?” I chimed in, attempting to assuage the heated debate but expecting a disruption. Walking into the kitchen was a sensorial experience my half-asleep child-self had so been accustomed to that years later, in a state of mid-wakefulness in another home, I was struck by a spark of longing. The smell of pork meat in a rich tomato sauce bath, the sight of the steamed-up kitchen windows from the hours of laborious cooking, the unquestioned presence of family members with their unsolicited opinions, and its overall feeling of unhurried planning and pacing was replaced by… silence. The silence of being somewhere new, somewhere unknown, on a Sunday hits different.
“It is what it is” – she killed my attempt to stir things up before it even saw the light of day. She was right – Sunday is what it is, and how dare I try to spoil its rituals. Sunday is sacred. Maybe that’s why, despite our creative differences, church didn’t hurt so bad. Not sleeping in, not going to play with my friends, not finally experiencing the freedom of an unscheduled school-less morning, and instead going to stand (and occasionally sit, then stand, then sit again) in a nave that smelled like piss and incense, filled with chanting strangers and rambunctious children was the ultimate, indisputable sacrifice for the ritual. The only known reasonable way to earn my Sunday feast and devour it greedily and unceremoniously – the Jesus way.
I’ve realized my God-less and church-less adult life has been an ongoing chase of rituals. However far I am from home, however long it takes to achieve the desired density of that sauce without that brand of tomato sauce, and whomever I am surrounded by, I know that in those moments I am conjuring up the same ceremonious, prescribed order of actions that once made me feel part of something without having to doubt it, without having to doubt me. A place where I can always find what I need because everything is where it’s supposed to be, where I can lay my whirlwind of chaos to rest and become a creature of habit.
A home.
For Your Inconsideration 