Routine.

According to one PaleoArchaeologist i recently met (yes, that's right) there have been at least five major extinction events (a.k.a. mass extinctions) in the history of the Earth.  (Ok. nerds, i know that arguably there are upward of twenty mass extinctions based on periods when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation...but she was of a more conservative mind and was on the team that believed a more stringent criteria needed to be met before the term "mass extinction"  could be trotted out; and since she was holding the big ass  Euoplocephalus femur and i wasn't, i decided i'd take her word for it.)

Today my children were all sitting around the den like many other Sundays past, watching their father and their uncle engage in a grueling game of golf (on the Wii) while their jovial brotherly banter, discussion of proper putting techniques, and general philosophies and pontifications on life carried through to the kitchen - where i stood laughing to myself, as usual, as i brewed another pot of coffee and pulled some meat and vegetables out to thaw for Sunday dinner.  I was chuckling to myself and enjoying this brief moment of pleasure (my poor babies have been sick all week and all together miserable) when i reflected on my own Sunday's growing up.

My father's parents lived five minutes away, and though they were over every Mon. thru Fri. to see my brother and i off to school, then walk us home from the bus stop, most Sunday's they would be over for whatever my mother was cooking up special in the kitchen.  While my brother and i did homework - my mother toiled over the most wonderful comfort foods (pot roasts, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, fried chicken cutlets, pork chops, etc. etc.)  that made my house smell cozy and inviting and down right homey - in the summer, my Dad would grill, the smell of booze, charcoal and cigarettes in the air.  Though fraught with daily anxieties (im sure), i recall these habitual Sunday dinners fondly - as warm family times - full of noise and laughter, good food, and love.  Though they seemed to take up most of my childhood, year after year if you asked me then, they ended all too soon when both my grandparents passed in the time of a month, over a cold, lonely winter before i was 13.  I guess you could say in the short history of our lives, we've suffered "extinctions."  Each marked, quite clearly, the end of one time period in my family's life, and the beginning of another.  I look back at my life and i can see the pattern - the rise of good times, good people; a routine - and then the slow, but all too sudden, fall that finally ends with us scratching our heads, looking down at our empty hands, and those wobbly steps toward the beginning of a new day.

Will my children remember these days? - brief certainly in the grand scheme of things - but the hallmark of their childhood "Sunday's" - a memory of better days, and happy times that, like all things, will one day become extinct.