Fridays and Family: A Reflection on Life’s Simple Joys

Today was a particularly melancholy day in Kentucky. The gunmetal skies hung low and heavy, with winds that howled and rattled the windows, gusting to 40 miles an hour. After yesterday’s cautiously optimistic news suggesting my wife’s recent cancer treatment was finally showing results—her bloodwork numbers improving for the first time in months—we both just sat around in our recliners, resting up and drifting in and out of fitful naps.

While my elderly Chihuahua, Poppy, snored softly on my chest during a rare quiet moment, her tiny heart thumping against my sternum, I realized it was Friday. Fridays used to be sacred in our household—a day of celebration as the work week ended. Like many young couples in the seventies, we’d gather with friends or family around dining room tables, playing cutthroat poker games with nickels and dimes, drinking a Hamms beer, and laughing until our sides ached after feasting at what we thought were great restaurants. (They weren’t.)

In the 50’s and 60’s, growing up in that small ranch house near Chicago, Fridays meant piling into Dad’s car for grocery shopping at the Jewel Food Store, begging to select our favorite sugary cereals and chocolate treats. For some reason, today was the first time I’d thought about those excursions in decades, and suddenly I understood something profound. We always went on Fridays because that was a day we had money—Dad’s weekly paycheck cashed and folded into Mom’s wallet.

My father worked hard, first as a milkman trudging through Chicago snowdrifts before dawn, then as an insurance agent with perpetually ink-stained fingers, while my mother stayed home with us kids. Little did my young self comprehend that the Friday ritual of watching Mom count bills at the bank teller’s window before grocery shopping was because our family teetered perpetually on the financial edge. It’s almost inconceivable now, that my parents lived their entire lives counting pennies until payday.

My mother fought cancer valiantly but passed away young in her 40’s, her hair still more black than gray, so I tried to keep a watchful eye on Dad afterward in his twilight years.He lived with us for awhile but I remember securing him a small but sunny condo near our place, seeing him three or four times a week. During his final Christmas, my wife cleverly got hold of his credit card statements, which revealed past-due notices and minimum payments. We quietly paid them off in full. Dad thanked us with tears in his rheumy eyes, then promptly used his cards again to buy presents for all his grandchildren and us. Nothing in my seventy-three years has ever made my heart swell more.

But today, as the storm clouds break and weak sunlight filters through the clouds, I’ve had a strange revelation: my father spent his entire life living paycheck to paycheck, pinching pennies and worrying about bills…yet somehow, he was always the first to laugh, the quickest with a joke, the most generous with what little he had. So what does that tell the rest of us who’ve chased wealth and security our whole lives?

Like I said, a melancholy day and a lesson that should be carved in Kentucky limestone. Such is life.