Sunday mornings are usually for coffee and Sunday papers. This morning, I was treated to the music of samba, a present from my friends who visited Brazil recently.
Sunday morning is also a time to check Facebook and catch up with what's happening with my friends and family on the other side of the world. Today I saw photos of my brother and his family playing badminton at their gym. Their lovely smiles and sweaty bodies make me want to join them and challenge them to a game of Badminton, too!
However, when I was growing up in Malaysia, Sunday mornings were not usually this slow. Sunday mornings meant chore times. We lived in a corner house and we had shrubs that lined our fence. Every few Sundays or so, my mom would trim the shrubs, and my brother and I would be tasked with cleaning up the leaves and branches. We did not have any big rake, instead, we swept with a coconut broomstick, like this:
For an hour or two we would be sweeping the leaves and branches while wiping off the sweats streaming down our faces and complaining about the heat. We piled up the leaves and moved them to a corner outside our house. We'd wait for it to dry before burning them. No, we did not have any green recycling back then, burning was a common practice to get rid of the leaves, because the trash man didn't take big bags of leaves either. Now I don't know how many tons of Co2 we created by burning leaves. But perhaps in other ways, we recycled by not wasting food, reusing empty bottles, and reusing water that was used for washing clothes to cleaning the chicken coop or cleaning the car port. Hopefully everything balanced itself out in the end.
When we were not sweeping up shrubs, we would wash my dad's car AND hand polish it. The washing part was no problem. In fact, we loved it as we could get into a water fight by spraying water onto each other, and pretended not to hear my mom's stern voice of disapproval. That was fun! But, the polishing part was difficult as we had to apply the wax, polish it with all our might, and buff it. It was hard work. Plus, being short at that age means we had to climb into the car to try to reach the top of the car in order to cover every inch of it.
I also remember having to hand clean all the louvre glass windows. Each of these windows was made up of a collection of glasses, like the plantation window shutters. I'd need to wipe each piece of glass for all the windows in the house, plus all the iron window grills. Yikes! Not a chore I looked forward to.
However, Sunday afternoons meant movie times. Every Sunday afternoon we could watch either a Chinese movie or an Indian movie on TV2. That's how our country's TV stations were setup at that time. TV1 was mostly a national channel, which means news in Malay and serious stuff that were in Malay or English. TV2 was set up for entertainment. To be fair to our Indian and Chinese Malaysians, we had Chinese movie one week and Indian movie the other. No matter, as a kid, as long as we could watch a movie on a Sunday afternoon, that was great!
Fast forward to my times in Ohio when I went to grad school.
Sunday mornings at grad school have escaped my memories!!! Perhaps I was back in my department working on data analysis or reading papers. Perhaps I was running on the bike path next to the golf course that runs along Hocking River. Perhaps I went to picnics at Stroud's run with friends in my department. A friend joked that when we were in grad school, "apartment" equals "department." We spent most of our times in our department in Porter Hall, studying, grading papers, running experiments, or analyzing data. We would go home and come back to the department office again in the evening to continue our work or study. That was also a time for bonding with fellow grad students. We whined about the difficult stats class. We mimicked some idiosyncratic movements of certain professors and laughed out loud. Or we goofed off by simply playing Tetris on the computer!
Sunday mornings in Washington DC was lived with a mission. Since I was only there for a short two-month summer internship, I was determined to visit all the Smithsonian museums while I was there. I would have breakfast and head out to the Mall. I had the best time checking out the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Natural History, and other Smithsonian museums. That's when I fell in love with Mattise, Calder, and Henry Moore. That's also when I was enchanted by the myriad colors and shapes of gem stones. That's when I discovered that museums are great places to loose myself into the worlds of others, unbounded by time and place. In contrast, I have never visited a museum in Malaysia, although there's a national museum just outside of KL.
Sunday mornings in DC were also the time when I accidentally unearthed my eye for photography. I was pleasantly surprised to see my photos came out looking like postcards! This chance encounter had fueled my passion in photography and led me to be a founding member of the Chicago Photography Center. For more than three years, I breathed in fumes in the darkrooms while learning about ISO, aperture, shutter speed, lighting, burning and dodging, and the relationships between a photographer and his/her subjects. I've also shown my works in two gallery openings and made some pocket money taking portraits for friends and acquaintances. :)
Sunday mornings in Chicago were dotted with visits to West Eggs Cafe in downtown Chicago, bike rides along the Lakefront or on the bike path from Evanston to Ravinia or the Chicago Botanic Garden. For three years in a row on Father's day, my friends and I did the Lakefront Boulevard Tour, a 35-mile ride that took us to riding on Lakeshore Drive, visiting neighborhoods in the West loop and the Southside of Chicago, and circling back on to the campus of University of Chicago. Sometimes I would wear the hat of a tour guide and bring my out-of-town friends on a Chicago Architecture Tour on the river, or simply spend a day at the Art Institute of Chicago or the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Sunday mornings in California are mostly quiet times with the SF Chronicle and listening to birds chirping outside my windows. I don't need to do any yard work or wash my car, thanks to apartment living and carwash! Perhaps I'll get some runs in for Sunday mornings. But, my apartment is so cozy that I'm content to be at home enjoying some quiet moments before another week begins.
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