Sunday Drives and Sunday Dinners

Okay, I’ll admit it.  After 24 years of marriage, I was struggling to satisfy my wife’s cheap ultimatum: she would no longer cook Mondays through Thursdays.  Not God, nor X-chromosome-accidents, nor twenty-six years of education (which, by the way, included a double-major Ph.D. from Stanford) had prepared me for this.  What really pissed me off the most was that my first wife, in spite of my breaking every rule of being a good husband, never once---not once---insisted that I take over her responsibilities in the kitchen.  I was lost, confused, and betrayed.  


In the pit of my darkness, I so wanted to go back to the days when my family and I could always count on a “Sunday Drive” and somehow miraculously arrive back home just in time for “Sunday Dinner” to be removed from my mother’s oven.  “It’ll be just a couple of minutes while I finish up the potatoes,” she would call from the kitchen.  “I hope the roast got done.”  


The roast or ham or turkey was ALWAYS done---to perfection.  Not only that, but there would be leftovers from which she would prepare several lunches and at least two additional dinners.  There would also be soup.  My little sister and I knew that the bones and scraps of meat left over from Sunday dinner, and Monday, and Tuesday and maybe Wednesday would appear as soup by Friday.  Roast-beef became beef vegetable soup; ham became split pea or bean soup; roast turkey could be turkey vegetable, turkey noodle, or even turkey rice soup.  


Why couldn’t my wife see how freaking easy this was?  


I ruminated on her unfair ultimatum for weeks until I found a loophole.  She was responsible for meals on Fridays, Saturdays and SUNDAYS.  All I had to do was convince her that my starving children deserved a special Sunday Dinner each week. I could use her Sunday Dinner Meat in my weekday family meals! Her leftover pork roast or prime rib or baby goat buried for 24 hours in hot wood coals in our back yard, plus a couple of vegetarian side dishes, would end forever the Cube Steak Wars.  Peace with Honor.  


Sunday Dinners, by their very nature, were special events that required focused time and attention.  She was the one who naively volunteered for Sunday Dinner Duty. The kids and I would even volunteer to “chip in” and help once in a while, in lieu of our Sunday Drive.  


For the first time in fourteen weeks, I felt a glimmer of hope that harmony and balance were being restored to our heartlessly war-torn marriage.