Perfect Sunday

Perfect Sunday,
originally uploaded by dvsjr.

My favorite thing to do on the weekend is to get up on Sunday morning and cook for the boys. I don’t cook for my wife especially, only because she doesn’t eat the same things and with the appreciation and gusto that teenage boys do. I do make her coffee, with milk, the way she likes, and I bring it up to her, either in bed or to her office where she is working or sewing. On Sundays I rise and go downstairs, take out the bowls and pans. I make biscuits from scratch, and almost always slow cook bacon. I cut fruit and pour milk, take out butter and jelly, set the table, and wait for that moment when we are all together, if only just for a moment.

My favorite writer, Andre Dubus, felt that making food for his family was a tiny sacrament. In his story, “Out of the Snow,” he said: “Watching the brown sugar bubbling in the light of the flames, smelling it and the cinnamon, and listening to her family talking about snow, she told herself that this toast and oatmeal were a sacrament, the physical form that love assumed in this moment.” “Being a mother had taught her that sacraments were her work, and their number was infinite.”

He felt that sacraments weren’t confined to the Catholic’s seven, but that life could be filled with them, which has a lot of similarities to the writing and ideas of Josemaria Escriva; finding grace in everyday work and in one’s profession.

Only thing missing in this perfect sunday pic is the boys seated on either side of me.