For as long as I can remember, there has always been something about Sundays that gets me stirred up, so that I am just a wee bit depressed, anxious, worried. All sorts of those feelings come to the surface.
Sometimes on a Sunday, it would be a hangover, or at least it used to be. With a hangover, of course, depression is to be expected. It is a chemical reaction that has to do with low blood sugar and an imbalance of brain chemicals (just check Instagram for specifics), and all of the things related to the drawbacks and harmful effects of excessive drinking. Of course, that was ages ago. Drinking too much is a thing of the past. Those were the days when a good, long run used to snap me back into a physiological place where I was happy all over again. Even so, Sundays have always been the hardest day of the week for me, no matter how much I fill it with healthy things to do and bright places to go.
As a child, I never liked Sundays. Our live-in housekeeper, Tina, would be out of the house. Tina was my best friend, my “second mommy”, as I told her often. She would go somewhere into downtown L.A. to see her Guatemalan friends, perhaps a few distant relatives, or anyone who could connect her to her country, and her teenage son, Hamlet.
With Tina away, things in our home would get a little toxic, a word that was unavailable when I was a child. My father would probably be worried, and my mother would be in her own world, also worrying, I am quite sure. Dad was a drinker back then, and he knew his wife didn’t care for him one bit. They were headed for divorce, and he wished in his heart that they weren’t. He loved his daughters, all three of us, but the only comfort he could muster was an offer to take us to the beach. So, off we would go to the Beach Club, which was located down the hill from our cliffside house in Pacific Palisades. It served as our blessed “third place”, another concept that never existed back then. Dad had home, his Spring Street office in downtown L.A. and one of his clubs, or Tom Bergin or Man Fook Low. For us girls, we had home, school, and the Beach Club.
Our mother’s third place was not the Beach Club. She never cared for it, even though most of her good friends might be there. Maybe she didn’t want to be with all of us. Whatever the case, on a Sunday, I can’t picture at all what she did, because we would disappear with Dad. Dad was trying to give us something to get our minds off of the emptiness, for lack of a better word, that could be felt around our beautiful house.
But then, night would come, and back we would go. The five of us, inside the house. And, even as a child, I could just feel the palpable tension of what Monday would— and wouldn’t —bring. Monday most likely brought Dad face to face with the massive debts my mother—and he to a certain extent—had incurred. His work wasn’t going as well as it used to. He was a stockbroker, and he seemed to have lost his edge. He was leveraged, which meant, so too was his family. We had to sell our house, most likely. And, then we would all be moving out of the family house. Worse, Dad knew mother had plans to separate.
As a child, I found Sunday so bleak because of the overall mood of the house, and, to add insult to injury, because there was absolutely nothing comforting on television. Those were the days of television where we had three networks and four independent channels. On Sunday, all the cartoons were different, and, unlike weekday programming, where we had things like “I Love Lucy” on KTTV (Channel 11), every night at 7 pm, there was no such luck on a Sunday. There were just these sobering grown-up news shows on almost every channel.
A television show I disliked in the most furious way because of its Sunday time slot was Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” with Marlin Perkins, on NBC (Channel 4). What some people probably adored every Sunday evening, I found flat and distant. I couldn’t appreciate it the way I might today.
As for Sunday cartoons, how can you be expected to like “Speed Racer” and “Kimba the White Lion” when you had Warner Bros. Animation, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes all week long? Speed Racer’s and Kimba’s animation, the peculiar music, the texture of the cartoon—it was Manga, and I wouldn’t know what that is for thirty more years. These are the things that made me feel like crying into my Sunday evening television in my dimly-lit den in my depressing Sunday night house.
Looking back, Speed Racer and Kimba felt different because they were different and happened to be my first taste of manga and Japanese anime. I learned at a young age that I just wasn’t a Japanese anime kid. It would take decades for me to engage with anime, largely because Speed Racer and Kimba just didn’t go down the right way, even though they were perfectly sweet and entertaining programs. I was, simply put, a Chuck Jones kid and an unapologetic fan of “The Bunny from Brooklyn.” I felt it in my bones that cartoons were no place for the enlightening adventures and sentimental drama of Speed Racer and Kimba. I needed my cartoons to give me Hollywood send-ups and the Barber of Seville in slapstick.
![Anime? Looney Tunes? Anime? Looney Tunes? You choose. "Speed Racer" Photo credit Funimation; "Elmer Season" Photo credit Warner Bros.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb518010-c14e-4d5d-8bc8-2cee763f61e5_324x307.jpeg)
![Anime? Looney Tunes? Anime? Looney Tunes? You choose. "Speed Racer" Photo credit Funimation; "Elmer Season" Photo credit Warner Bros.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbae9924c-565b-4559-b10c-0d9e1ba69dba_1836x1354.jpeg)
As for the five of us inside our lovely house, I don’t know how mother even managed to prepare dinner. I am not sure she did. Dad, always trying to be cheery, would maybe barbecue. But, then Dad and mother would fight. He might storm off—I can see him once walking out the front door, across the circular brick driveway with the majestic Chinese elm at its center, and he would huff past the gates onto the street, Corona del Mar, and walk a block or two.
Nothing would happen in the house, and I am not sure if we even ate. Mother would go to her bedroom, the house would grow dark, and we didn’t know where Dad had gone.
I know now that both of my parents tried hard—Dad a bit harder than mother— to keep up a good, happy front for us kids. But, in the end, they both slipped, tempers flaired, and we all suffered. This scenario—the Sunday nights in the “big house”—with my family, on those last days that we were ever a family of five under one roof, may have shaped my inescapable antipathy towards Sundays.
On Sundays, I feel a shroud of sadness. It is not profound sadness, it is simply a helpless sadness, a sadness that has no answers. It is a day that provides no comfort for worries that are hard to pin down exactly. They are just there, and Monday is coming.
Monday is welcome for so many reasons, part of which has to do with feeling like we are reconnected to the rest of the world, which was “closed”, “away”, even “cut off” on Sunday. Still, Monday brings some of us, like my father, face-to face with the nuts and bolts of our worries, but at least they are more tangible and not looming somewhere above the Sunday shroud.
On Sunday, I often hear the lyrics, the sorrow, and the voice of Billie Holiday, singing “Good Morning Heartache.” Even though her melancholy is about a man—and those Sunday feelings would soon enough come into my life — I think the idea is universal:
“I’ve go those Monday blues, straight through Sunday Blues…”
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