Homage To Thursdays

I have a thing for Thursdays. There’s something about the sound of the word. It feels juicy to me, bursting with the nectar of possibilities. It is the answer to thirsty. Thursday is not arid like Wednesday with that silent D…such a waste of a letter, parched and withered. Thursday is Thor’s day; Jupiter, god of thunder foretelling wetness and the dawn of a new day…which proves my point.

What was my point? I’ll think of something by the time I reach the bottom of the page.

Thursday is an auspicious day. The one when the Declaration of Independence was signed back in 1776. It’s a day plump with vision. Fifteen years before that Benjamin Franklin flew his kite also on a Thursday. 

Thursday was a holy day for me early on because it had a way of always preceding Friday which meant weekly tests. Not being very bright I decided I might need a touch of providential intervention to get me through the ordeal. So every Thursday night I became devout only to correct the doubtful attribution by the next day.

Franklin Roosevelt died on a Thursday. In a strange way I count that as my day of entry into the adult world. He was literally a god to me. PresidentRoosevelt was one word. I knew no other. Sad and shaken as I was that April afternoon in 1945 I felt no longer a child at age twelve. Everyone was crying openly. just like me. A poor Black man was asked if he knew the president and he replied, no, but he knew me. FDR intoned the way you’d expect a deity to speak…from on high. When he died, God died and I was existentially on my own.

Thursday is the well-chosen day for our most secular quasi-religious holiday when we gather together to thank the cosmic crapshoot which brought us to this table as guests rather than as the sacrificial turkey stuffed with assorted breadcrumbs and berries.

Thursday was also the day when Peggy let fly her weekly poems to articulate the ineffable and her exuberance for life which sang off the pages, even if they may have confounded us.

I think my point has something to do with belief…which is necessarily elusive. One might even say, mysterious. Interesting to note that the word mysterious has its origin in the Greek word myein which meant closed…as in a mouth. So mystery is akin to mute. I’ll say nothing more about the subject till next Thursday.