Back in the day, when you read the newspaper in a print version, a singular treat when you were up and about on a Saturday night was to buy the Sunday NY Times and get a headstart on reading it before it was actually Sunday. There were newsstands on Flatbush Avenue that would get the papers around 11 o’clock so you could buy it on your way home from hanging out with your friends on a Saturday night. Back then, that was a trade secret reserved for “night owls”. Reading the paper today is a totally different experience. Articles that will appear in the print version on Sunday begin to get inserted into the digital version as early as Thursday. I didn’t realize this until I noticed my brother Matt was talking to me about subjects of Sunday Routine BEFORE Sunday morning. 

Sometimes I’m happy when he alerts me to an article that is sitting there getting ready for publication on Sunday, mostly the political pieces, because during quarantine, to have a scoop on family members can give me a critical advantage in rancorous political exchanges (that’s right, I said rancorous). If I know a couple of days ahead of time about Supreme Court arguments or a study that proved a thing that no one seems to agree about, well, that’s a score! But, one section of the paper I always leave for reading on a Sunday morning is the Routine section. Reading this section of the paper has become part of my Sunday routine, I wait to look at it with breakfast on a Sunday morning.

But, every Sunday, around 8 AM, I can count on Matt to start texting me about the Routine section. See, I told you we were going to get back to the routine section. More on this tomorrow. Go wash your hands, if you’re getting bored with that, wash somebody else’s hands.