TGIF

Friday.

Is there a better day of the week? Work seems less annoying because the weekend is almost here. People are asking you about your plans. Or perhaps you’re making plans? Or trying to get out of the ones you’ve already made? Are you going somewhere for the weekend? Because you could if you wanted to. For 48 hours the world is yours!

Unless of course you work on the weekends. If you do, just close you eyes and imagine I’m talking about Tuesday instead.

Actually, open your eyes, you’ll need them to keep reading.

I remember being in the six grade at Sevier Middle School. Which was an appropriate name for a school housing 11-13 year olds. Six grade is a tough year for most human beings. Having just left the comfort of fifth grade for the emotional battlefield that is middle school. Months before I had been a safety patrol, at the top of the elementary school pyramid, and now here I was changing classes and listening to 8th graders tell me I walked like a penguin. Fridays were a longed for oasis. A soothing balm, a home base in the middle of hostile territory.

My last class was science. Maybe. Yeah, Earth Science I think it was, and my teacher was an old guy. I forgot his name. I literally forgot he existed until right now. It was my last class of the day and every Friday I would sit at my desk, not paying attention, thinking about how I was only mere hours away from the highlight of Friday evenings. Hell, the highlight of my week, my months, my years!

I was hours away, from T.G.I.F.

Not sure if they still have this, but TGIF was ABC’s Friday night line up and it had all the best sitcoms on television. I would throw a big pillow down on the ground and from 8pm to 10pm I would lie on the floor and watch. The lineups would change from time to time, but it was some brilliant combination of Perfect Strangers, Growing Pains, Mr. Belvedere, Full House, Just the Ten of Us.

I’m not quite sure if anything in life has made me happier.

That sentence looks sad on paper. But I don’t think it is. That feeling I would get at 7:58pm, right before the shows would start, was the best. I was at home. Safe, secure. At the time, my parents made the perfect amount of money. Not enough to spoil us, but enough so their children didn’t have to worry. My stomach was full from dinner. My family was all there. All week we had run around to school and theatre classes and basketball practice and orchestra rehearsals. Dad had been working and mom was dealing with us kids. But from 8pm-10pm on Friday nights, I let all of it got. I turned off my brain. I enjoyed life. I can’t remember the last time I totally turned my brain off for two hours. Or leaned into doing nothing so fully as I did on those Friday nights at our house on Pennwood Lane off of State Park Road.

It didn’t last of course. Nothing ever does. 7:58 quickly turned to 10:01, and Friday night soon became Monday morning. And I seemed to go from that 11 year boy to a 41 year old man in the blink of an eye as well.

I don’t know what I’m going to do tonight, but I’m going to try to get as close to that TGIF feeling as I possibly can. Happy. Secure. Content.

I wish the same for you as well.

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