Sundays are for Extravagance
By: Marcus Anthony Brock
Tags: Life, Essay, Relationships, Self, Culture

Sundays are for Extravagance

Photo by Christian Rodriguez

Today, it is the last Sunday of the month. Today, it is the last Sunday of 2020. Today, it is the last Sunday at my current age. Today, it is the last Sunday for Sunday mass for some. Today, it is the last Sunday for Sunday dinners for others. Today, it is the last Sunday. But today, it is Sunday, and also the first week of everything else.

Have you noticed how Sundays feel, well, just differently than other days in the week? They’re sometimes too light and sometimes all too heavy. Maybe you’re working, dreading the imminent week, or grabbing flowers to place on your loved one’s burial site. Or perhaps, on the mantle of your home? Sundays have always felt sacred to me, in that an honoring of sorts becomes requisite. And while days of the week may seem arbitrary, just like Mary, there’s something about Sunday.

Sundays remind me of what poet, Frank O’Hara, captures in “Having a Coke with You.” It’s a poem that asks for the moment to be loud, to be referenced, to be present, and the person in front of you to be loved — capturing the stillness and bounty that the quotidian can often dilute and make mundane. On this Sunday, we’re flanked between the ending of the holiday season and the new year to come, so our hearts are anxious, but I think they are ready for 2021.

The Sundays of gathering we used to know have morphed into something else in the Coronavirus pandemic. We’ve had to set new traditions and find new ways to gather on Sundays. When I have been alone on Sundays this year, I have held on to living memories to get me through it all. I’ve gone through mementos, memories, and music to take me back to living memories that have brought so much happiness to my life.

Five years ago, I remember a very special Sunday. My mind and heart were rather quiet for a change, thus I found myself reveling in the bounty of the week’s end and very much looking forward to that capstone day. I awoke that morning to meet a friend, Pageant, for lunch at Maison Premiere. Afterwards, we headed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to view a Jacob Lawrence exhibition on the Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South: One Way Ticket. Just the week before I sat in a jam-packed taqueria with my dear friend, Jonathan. We were seated next to two very funny ladies, one of which stopped to pull two fluorescent-colored cards from her pocketbook before they left us. The cards were free passes to MoMA.

The ladies were unable to attend, so the cardholder made me promise her that I’d go see One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works. Jonathan had flown back home, so when a Sunday had arrived where calendars finally aligned for myself and Pageant, we made good on that promise.

Though, we dined at Maison Premiere before we entered those cavernous, yet bountiful, museum walls. Seated in the garden just behind the restaurant, my Converse shifted against and with the white pebbles that the tables were steeped in. I began to look around as I waited for Pageant, flipping through my worn and torn ‘Time 100’ magazine. Pageant wiped the sweat from his brow since it was rather humid as he walked towards me into the gazebo.

We kee-kee’d so loudly with our hearts pumping and bellies gratefully full. I noticed one lady walk through the garden, her head tilted towards the clouds, in a pastel-colored wrap dress that fluttered in the wind. Then I noticed the dangling metallic belt that impeccably snatched her figure. The couple behind Pageant were embracing each other and canoodling away. Another couple enjoyed decadent French toast and steak with eggs, then halfway through each plate, they both pushed them 180 degrees to finish off the other’s plate.

Among the canoodling, Pageant’s Absinthe and just the tenderness in the air, I began to think about abundance. I began to think about Sunday. I began to think about loving up on ourselves. I began to think about childhood and ironing my clothes on Sunday mornings. I began to think about this rather cool restaurant in Berlin, On a Sunday in August.

As I enjoyed brunch in a filigree-covered gazebo, I was overjoyed that my friends were simultaneously dancing away in another part of the city as Spike Lee was adorned in Bed-Stuy with a street in his honor: ‘Do the Right Thing Way.’ This all made me think about extravagance. And because I have those memories, I can also trace that it was Summer, 2015, when I felt that immense happiness envelop me for the day and throughout the week. And so I carry it with me.

On Sundays, people wear large hats. On Sundays, car enthusiasts pull their lowriders and vintage Mercedes from the garage to drive or just for a polish, only to put it away for safekeeping. Some go into the hutch to dust off the fine bone china for that 3 pm southern style family dinner. Did you binge-watch Netflix? Of course, you did. I have. Sundays you either have zero goals or way too many.

Did you sleep in until 12 pm, then lie there for another hour laughing during a joyous text exchange with a friend, using all the memes you had stockpiled during the week? You’re not alone. Did you wake up at 6 am to jumping kids in your bed? Did you get that massage you’ve been yearning for? Did you maybe get up at 5 am to spend all day helping others of your faith in your community? Or maybe you just rested. Did you go visit your grandparents and per usual, there were baked goods and maybe your grandfather had on his shiny leather shoes and a three-piece suit? Or maybe your sadness seemed to exacerbate itself, you know because it’s Sunday?

Later on that 2015 afternoon, I saw a woman donning a spectacular vintage hat as if she had stepped from the page of an Erté illustration. The gentleman holding her clutched one arm around hers, and the other hand grappled with a strap from his distressed, caramel leather backpack and earth-tone fedora. They looked extravagant, and not just in style or visibly, they were excessively joyful. Everyone was stealing a glance, but acting as though they weren’t. It was fantastic. Like Grace Jones, that Sunday felt free.

We often equate extravagance to money or materiality. But, what is extravagance in its simplest form, but lacking restraint? And lacking restraint shouldn’t be pejorative. Extravagance implies ornamentation, over-consumption and excess. And speaking of excess, I surely did stop in a candy store on the way to the subway that day and paid $1 and some nickels for a single caramel chocolate turtle; they’re my mother’s favorite candy. Was it excessively extravagant? Probably. But I didn’t mind. Clearly, the memory of it all is thriving today in 2020 as it did on that Sunday afternoon in 2015. The interaction with the store clerk. Me licking the chocolate from my fingertips. Me smiling as I took the last bite.

It all lives on. It’ll all live on.

So, now here it is five years later. Not soon after that lovely summer Sunday, Pageant and I stopped talking, for years in fact. Early on in this pandemic year, he called me. It wasn’t the first time he reached out, but I made sure and felt compelled, to call him back this time. As soon as he answered, we just went into a conversation as though no time had passed. We both laughed, and talked, and laughed for hours. And after nearly three hours, a formal apology came in from Pageant, but in so many ways, we both knew it had already been said, but we took some time at the end of our gathering to mark the significance of where our friendship erred, to hear each other out, and that was important.

How do we live and love from a deep well in a global pandemic, when you are just longing for yesterday? And though there is no yesterday, there are yesterday’s memories. So on Sunday, love should have no restraint, on how you love and cherish yourself, or wrap yourself in your child’s arms, or wrap yourself in a weighted blanket, holding on to yourself and your soul tightly because Sundays are for extravagance. I haven’t always been successful at Sunday, nor have I ascended the art of “being still,” an art that my

Big Momma has taught me over the years. Though, I believe it’s important to take Sunday to tell yourself — in a kaleidoscope of ways— that you love you — and through symbiosis, all your encounters will reap that love, too.

Not on purpose, but rather coincidentally, one of the paintings in the Jacob Lawrence exhibition halted me, №10, depicted a black family with small rations at dinner titled: “They were very poor.”