Sunday Baroque

Jammed in the corner of my bed, in the corner of my room, in the corner room of my house is where it was safe to wake every morning. Contentedly nestled in the corners. It was absolutely necessary to keep every body part covered by blankets in case a roaming bandit, who might stumble upon my house and decide it was ripe for the picking. Any skin peeking out from comforters and hand sewn quilts would result in a swift and merciless death at the hands of a decadent, black-hearted swashbuckler, whose ship had hit the rocky sand bed off the coast of my middle-class suburban town.

Being that my room was placed conveniently in the front of the house, I had no doubts that this burglar would slowly sneak through the window at the foot of my bed, with his gleaming saber clinched between his black tooth grin. And with a patched eye, glance at my bed and seeing no skin would frown and move on to another more thoughtless victim. I spent the sunsets of my childhood with my feet pulled into the fetal position as to not trip the burglar of the seven seas when he came in, lest I draw too much attention to myself.

No one would rob anyone on a Saturday though, so I always felt safe when I went to bed, and even turned up my nose at my dads tucking me in policy, which I was more than welcome to any other night; "Don't worry dad, it's a Saturday, all the robbers have church in the morning".

Sunday mornings had always been different. There was no school to dread and frantically avoid by the sniffles and a pre-prepared cough but there was also no Saturday droll of lawnmowers throughout the neighborhood or the beep beep of roadrunner, followed closely by my dads chuckles. No, Sunday morning had an ambiance all its own, an inextricable pattern of events that would ultimately end with my family sitting in the second pew from the back of the church, examining the bulletin for typos while the organ music bounced off the wooden pillars and stained glass windows into the ancient ears of half-asleep congregation members.

Streams of light slipped through the cracked blinds of my room creating a small, stripped pattern of light on the floor, in which my dog Wolfgang would lay. Dust laid along side him in thin sheets on the floor, where it rolled and turned like it was alive and well. It had always been dusty, in this particular room anyway, which gave it the sense of overlooked antiquity that an attic or an abandoned haunted house might have. Each dust particle swirled lethargically in the light streams and rested in a sheen on Wolfgang's back, as if he were Anubis himself, carved into the wall of a buried tomb to perpetually guard the forsaken souls of the dusty underworld.

Every movement in bed sent a cloud of newly revived dust into the already saturated air and up my nostrils for a near death experience every morning before breakfast. Of course, dust wasn't what woke me every morning; dust is silent and goes quietly to sleep as the world dies. The sound of my dad's slowly deteriorating coffee grinder blades dully crushing beans was enough. There was no escaping that grating sound, it came from all sides and all angle, robbing from me those last few moments of lazy blissfulness.

My dad always dragged me into coffee shops where this grinding sound was like elevator music to the herds of coffee sheep, waiting in line twitching and gyrating while talking on cell phones about important brewing issues, I imagined. The beans were in separate mini silos behind a glass case and I would ask my dad if he ever bought the most expensive kind, the Blue Mountain Jamaican, the premium coffee lovers cocaine, for a mere $40 per lb. His rebuttal was a humph, followed by the stock "talk to your mother". That must have been the resounding response by coffee lovers wives, for that silo of beans was always filled to the brim. Perhaps in a subconscious act of revenge, my dad always bought the whole beans when the pre-ground beans were the same price. My mom would groggily complain about this fact in the morning but my dad would always retort, "Grinding takes the flavor out of the coffee", after which he would continue grinding.

Sundays were no exception to my mother's incessant complaints, except that she was already awake of her own accord and slumped over the stove making eggs, while trying to yell over the coffee grinder for my sister and me to get out of bed. I never heard her, and my sister pretended that she didn't hear.

My routine was already set; no matter how much energy she wasted trying to out shout the coffee grinder. I got out of bed 4 minutes after I woke up, leaving just enough time for my mom to get annoyed but not enough for her to come storming in, allowing the noise to burst through the door like a bitter winter wind that slips through and causes everyone inside to shiver and yell at the newcomer. "Shut the door. Don't you know it's freezing?"

The consequences for not waking up weren't worth the extra 20 seconds of sleep. I rolled from the corner of my bed onto the floor with a thump, sending a dust mushroom cloud into the air and causing Wolfgang's ears to stand up.

Walking towards my door, each step sending a little dust puff into the air like cowboys spurred leather boots shifting the dust of a ghost town, I could hear the dull roar behind my door. As soon as I opened it, I would be confronted by the screeching sound of my dads refreshment, like surfacing from a dive at the public pool and being assaulted by the gossip of middle age women on rickety fold out lawn furniture and elementary kids screaming simply because screaming wasn't explicitly prohibited.

For Christmas I asked for the earmuffs that runway directors have or the bright orange ones that hunters use at the shooting range. My mom said that was a silly thing to ask for and bought me a talking Ninja Turtle that used to say "cowabunga" but now moaned unintelligibly when you squeezed his shell. The talking turtle was now sitting a the foot of my bed, covered in dust, seemingly misplaced, even though I had just played with him the other day. Opening the door was the hardest part but I did it every Sunday and walked out with my hands on my ears and dust falling down out of my hair; emerging from my embalmed sleep.

Mom was banging pans around in a clamoring attempt to usurp my dad's stranglehold on the noise level in the house but to no avail. Dad would stand at the corner of the counter, puffing on his pipe and looking at the bird feeder through the window over the sink, unaffected. Defeated, my mom would turn back to the eggs, scrambling them while saying something over her shoulder to me, which I could only decipher by her lip movements. "Hurry pup and seat so you will have time to address" is what she was saying, at least, I think. I never thought to ask.

But every morning for years she had always been the last one ready, running out to the car with a tube of my grandma's passion red lipstick in her fingers and a Bible in the crux of her arm. I never knew why she had to apply makeup in the tiny, misshapen car mirror on the bumpy suburban back roads of our neighborhood because she was already dressed at breakfast in one of her numerous multi-colored "spring" sweaters and plain black slacks: her hair would be up in purple curlers resembling vandalized hay bails, waiting to be taken into the barn. Maybe she was late because she spent too much time frying and scrambling eggs but were all thankful she did but not because of the eggs.

Good things do not come to those who wait but to those who wait on eggs. In a frenzied haze of worry, business and the creeping suspicion of going deaf, mom would set the eggs on the table and like a joyful punch in the gut, the grinding, disheartening buzz of my dads ancient coffee grinder would cease, leaving room in the air for Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 or Haydn's Opus 33 or one of Vivaldi's seasons to drift through the house as a melodic backdrop for my families jabbering and scrambling attempts to get to church.

All I knew of classical music was the names of composers and that was simply because my dad would name all our pets after them (Bach the iguana, Amadeus the goldfish and our deaf tabby cat Ludwig, who always ran into table legs). Every piece would blur together into one colossal work of classical music. During the interval of peace dad would brew his coffee quietly, each drip plunking in his worn Peregrine Falcon mug. He would puff smoke bursts quietly and badger my mom quietly about how the eggs were runny, and we would all grumble discontentedly but in the silence of Sunday Baroque.