October 15, 2005
Some days, there might as well be a warning message that flashes on my computer, “Smash head on keyboard to continue.”
Days like this breed the blues.
You know what it is like.
For starters, first thing in the morning, the computer does not cooperate at all. Important letters get lost in the mail. Previously iron-clad contracts mysteriously fall apart. Phone messages get mixed up. Your loan payment gets applied to someone else’s account. A deposit was not credited on time. A friend is mad at you, and you have absolutely no idea what you did to incur their wrath. Travel tickets that you carefully mailed over-night express to elderly relatives do not arrive as promised by 3 p.m. the next day. Of course, that is when they absolutely had to have them.
It is much like TV journalist Linda Ellerby’s philosophical lament, “And, so it goes.”
By Sunday night, you are positively worn out with it all. You have given up philosophizing about your distress, and that is when the blues begin to take hold. After all, Monday morning looms ominously on the horizon when all this fun will start all over again.
This is when I decide I must have the “Sunday Night Clanks,” also known as the Sunday night blues. The act of diagnosing my ailment in itself brings relief. Usually, I even manage to smile thinking about the “clanks.”
Naturally, at this point one might rightly wonder why I call those blues the “clanks.”
Some many years ago, an old friend, Pat Hanna, first told me about the Sunday Night Clanks (SNC) when I was, admittedly, depressed and a tad whiney. I was convinced “the sky was falling.” Today, I can’t even remember why I was so miserable. Pat’s explanation for my distress was soothing. Perhaps, just having a name for the malady helped. Who knows? The point is that I began to feel better and laughed at such a silly name for my unhappy state of mind.
When my children were little, the Sunday night blues would cause them to worry and fret at bedtime. Their schoolwork was not finished. Their friends did not like them any more. The teacher was mean. Worst of all, they did not get picked for the “cool” kids Four Square team during recess.
At that point, everything looked bleak and hopeless to them.
This was my cue.
I would very confidently tell them that everything would be OK. The only thing wrong was that they had a bad case of the “Sunday Night Clanks.” They never asked me what that was, come to think of it. They were satisfied with my answer and even smiled a bit. It might as well have been a sunny Tuesday. They had a cause, a diagnosis, an explanation. That was good enough for them and off they went to bed.
My Grandmother had her own version of the SNC. She advised us, “When life brings problems to your door, do not worry and never, ever borrow trouble. It will all come out in the wash.”
Calvin Coolidge said it another way, “Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you.”
Do not worry. It is only the “clanks.”
