I remember years and years ago how I use to celebrate Saturday and Sunday. It is amusing to look back on those times and marvel at how I spent my time? Was it useful? Probably not…

I have made 57 orbits around Sol. I have watched the elimination of leaded gas. The arrival of the Environmental Protection Agency. The disappearance of cigarette advertising. The arrival of video games and the personal computer. I watched the final Apollo mission on television, kind of. I marveled at the invention of MTV and now it is gone. I started watching a television on a black and white screen that could get 4 channels on a good day… now there is nothing on and the options are endless. So much history has marched by… So much technology has changed my life so thoroughly… Yet I never really celebrated Saturday or Sunday wholesomely.

Ok Saturday and Sunday in my teens, was primarily work. My brother and I delivered newspapers in our neighborhood for about eight years. When I had a conflict, he would cover the route, and vice versa. We started with 70 customers and we grew that to well over 100 hundred. This was our after school and Saturday routine. A couple of hours a day. $20-30 bucks a week. Riding our bikes all year (snow, sleet, rain, and heat.) Sundays were church, more church, and then chores around home. Once I turned 16 things began to diversify in the employment arena. When I wasn’t doing activities with school, I would work for my dad’s employer as a laborer. I did a bit of everything for that oil company. I even learned how to drive a truck (illegally of course.) Fun: There wasn’t a whole lot of it. Occasionally I would meet up with friends for movies and pizza. That would be VHS movies at $3 a pop for a two day rental. Once in a while there would be fishing, tubing, or waterskiing on the river I grew up along. Weekends at the age of 16 or 17 were not that much in the way of fun… Just a different type of work… any down time was spent listening to music, playing video games (25 cent variety,) reading, or the rare moment of watching 13 channel cable. Mostly late nights till midnight at most.

College years were more interesting. While in college I would sleep until 10 a.m. or later, depending on the party I may have attended the night before. There was usually a performance of some kind most weekends: Football, Basketball, Concert Band, recital to work, etc… I would still fit in some practice, occasional study time. I was not a great student those first couple years in college. Freedom was hard to get used to. Summer was spent working at a factory and playing in community bands or groups and lots of fishing/beer drinking if I could get someone to buy…

The later college years were all work. When my dad got hurt on the job, any assistance I received disappeared. I went to work. The final years were spent working forty hours a week in the restaurant business around a full-time music major schedule. Sleep was a luxury and fun was in limited supply. Every minute was structured. It was here I learned how not to have fun. Summer was more of the same… work, work, work…

Once I entered the professional work force as a teacher, weekends were filled with festivals, athletic events, contests, and what not. I would go home exhausted. I would sleep or partake in beer, liquor, whatever to stop feeling the exhaustion. Fun was watching sports on my television in my apartment. All my friends were 300-400 miles away in the Northern part of Illinois.

Fun was never really fun. I didn’t know how to have fun. It was work, work, work, masquerading as fun. Overeating, over drinking, overworking, and never feeding the mind with anything healthy… Every solution I had to my misery was more work, harder work… Vacations were rare. When they did happen drinking was involved in some way… then crash…

After 2015 things all changed for me. I stopped drinking and all of sudden I had all of this time. I didn’t want to fill every moment with work. Yes, I still enjoyed music making, but it wasn’t the singular interest in my life. I wanted to feel the sun, breathe the fresh air. Ride my bicycle, work out the stress at a gym, rewire my brain, and find out who I was as a person. I was seeing color for the first time in decades… Meeting my wife a couple years later, she helped me even more find out what fun is.

My Saturday and Sunday now is usually filled with farting around. It could be geocaching, hiking, reading, watching baseball, playing with my dogs, writing, or working on something around the house that I may want to or have to do.

This Saturday it was beginning the clean up of the yard after many weeks of frozen dog doo… That’s what everyone enjoys or calls fun, right??? I’m chuckling about this, because I spent some of Friday afternoon after work raking. Then I spent an hour filling large garbage bags full of frozen… dog… Piece of advice… do this job when it is cold outside. It smells less offensive… Ha Ha!!!

Then I went out and had some fun… I had a hike in a refuge, looking for a whopping six caches. It was awesome. Ice fisherman were on the lake making their own noise. I was rumbling through prairie grasses and trees hunting down little containers and signing logs. I also put out 16 caches for a geocaching art that we are building. Then we grabbed another cache before making a quick dash to Sam’s Club where I dropped my wife at the door and drove to the back part of the lot to enjoy some lunch before having to pick her up at the door in maelstrom of craziness. The rest of my fun day was listening to music, cuddling with dogs, and doing some geocaching work for the geo-art. I never once turned on the television or doom scrolled… I just let my mind and body heal and have some fun…

Tomorrow we have a geocaching event, before I go on another little hike. I have to discuss this with my wife. It is amazing how cool the world is around you when you get out of the box called your apartment or house and go marvel in it. Geocaching has kept me moving. I have finally learned how to have fun on Saturday and Sunday. My church is the outdoors. I revel in the Earth’s magnificence. I see wildlife everywhere. I love hearing the birds. It is righteousness without the baggage and guilt of religion. Vacations happen much more often. Whether they are weekend trips to ball games or to see something we haven’t visited before. I wish I would have had this enlightened knowledge 30 years ago… We Americans kill ourselves for our work. We punish ourselves for our lack of success financially, so to speak. We are all trying to get rich…. We forget about life…

I learned something 11 years ago. I learned to stop and have fun. A walk in the woods with my kids or a lap on the bike paths with my wife sure beats sitting in the house. BTW, I still find time to do work around the house, and I still find downtime to bluster on about nothing on a Saturday… or Sunday… This is way more fun than sitting at a basketball game playing music with teenagers, because I have to. I really appreciate every minute of my Saturday and Sunday when I can do what I want to do.

Lesson to be learned… If you can, just stop… Do something different than sitting in your box. Go out and walk, even if it is cold. Go out and see the wild world around you, not the mall. Stop playing the video game. Turn off the television, just listen to music. When the weather is warm… go read a book at the park and just listen to the sounds of the world around you… These little things are fun… Imbibing on stuff isn’t… I will tell you cleaning my yard isn’t exactly fun, but the time I did work on it this morning was satisfying. It wasn’t the job… that sucks… it was the movement and the crisp cool air biting on my cheeks. It was good to be alive… and having some fun on a Saturday… away from the bullshit of politics and doomscrolling through facebook… …just made the day more fun…

I needed this… fun… so do you… go do…

…as life goes…