With just the two of us, the distinctions between the weekdays and the weekend days has vanished. Neither of us is religious, so the marker of Sunday services is meaningless for us. The days are all the same, none with greater importance. Television is on demand, so key TV on Thursday night no longer rules. Sports have never been a large focus, fandom is foreign, avoided as is nationalism. And professional sports, the week starting Thursday, major games Sunday, Monday Night Football, with the occasional Saturday, no longer focus attention on a single weekend game day.

We still get a Sunday paper. My parents drove out Saturday evening for the early edition to scan, in the early days of setting up the house, the yard sales and latter, when more settled, looking towards the empty nest years, the real estate listings. Our Sunday paper has none of that ritual, and increasingly remains unread. My days of arriving at the bar on opening at noon – sharing sections of the one paper, often with a “Have you seen?” and flipping to the article to share, ended with marriage and is an artifact in the digital age. The bartender, slowing making drinks, prepping the citrus for the evening rush, ferrying a section of the paper to far end of the bar, stood aloof. He always completed the Sunday crossword, sometimes filling in the last two or three responses to the clues as the first customer arrived. We always let him finish as we waited for our orders sometimes looking for the second, clean puzzle reserved for patrons.

Recently, order more than waking, making coffee, feeding and walking the dog has crept back. Exercise class, encouraged by grown children and the family doctor, now happens twice a week. The must watch TV host, after fifteen years, has scaled back to once-a-week. A community activity is now Wednesday afternoon, when school’s in session. The week begins to return to a shape — Saturday now marks itself by a walk to the library to read the diversion sections in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal — who needs a serious review of the week when they are so much the same?