3,993 Sundays

I like Sundays. This (as I write) being one of them and, my mind working the way it does, I suddenly wondered just how many Sundays I have had in my life. My lousy math aside, I came up with an approximate number, probably accurate within ten… of 3,993. That’s roughly the equivalent of eight years’ worth of Sundays.

As you might gather, I also like trivia, a trait I have given to Elliott Smith, the protagonist of my new mystery series. I describe Elliott as “collecting trivia rather like black pants attract cat hair”. He can tell you the height, in stories, of every skyscraper he passes regularly, and the number of steps between floors in any stairwell he uses frequently.

I’m not quite as good as Elliott, but I delight in little details that very few other people either know or care about–like Chicago’s elevated/subway Red Line having 34 stops along its route, and 28 stops on the all-elevated Brown Line. (Red Line trains always run with 8 cars, but before recently completed renovations to extend the length of the elevated passenger platforms, Brown Line trains ran with either 4 or 6 cars.) Chicago has 8 different color-designated elevated lines: Red, Brown, Purple, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Pink, Green.

Why I find trivia so fascinating I of course have no idea, but I know it comes naturally. Though, as I so often say, I have no idea why or how my mind works the way it does, I suspect there must be a few loose wires in there somewhere which, like a faulty light switch, spark randomly. Perhaps it is a part of my egocentrism that for the most part I truly enjoy never knowing what my mind will come up with next, in what direction it might take me, or how any particular unsolicited thought manages to rise to the surface.

I enjoy opening the dictionary to any random page and letting my eyes draw me to one word. First, I like to see if I already know the definition, but the definition will often include a word or two that I want to know more about (what is its origin? Is it related to another word or words?) And off I’ll go, flipping from page to page, word to word, definition to definition.

But back to my 3,993 Sundays. How many of them can I specifically remember? The only one that comes immediately to mind, of course, is Sunday, December 7, 1941, which was our original 9/11, branded indelibly in the mind of anyone who was alive at the time and old enough to have started forming memories. And yet there have been 3,992 other Sundays, the specific details of which I cannot readily remember. Many/most of them are therefore lost, and that disturbs me. I cannot stand to waste anything.

But through my writing, and specifically the two year period covered by my A World Ago blog (http://www.doriengrey.blogspot.com , in case you missed it) and other retained letters and kept e-mails, I can go back and not only remember, but relive, some of those lost Sundays, and that gives me a great deal of comfort. People, places, and events that would otherwise be lost forever in the great ocean of time, can be if not relived, at least revisited with the clarity of looking through the glass wall of an aquarium.

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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.