Black Friday deals or no deals no big deal

By s.r.g. | Published: 7 November 2009

Black. Black. Black! Black is the color of my true love’s hair.1

My true love and I were married two days before a Black Friday. That would mean we were married on a Wednesday. That Wednesday does not enjoy a color association other than that I’ve carried with me quietly from early childhood, not remembering when I learned the days of the week, or the names  of colors. Wednesdays, to me, have always been yellow. I don’t know why. I really don’t. And so, I think it unfair the other days during the week of Black Friday are not associated with colors as is that particular Friday. To my knowledge, such is the case in our culture ever aspiring toward a colorblind society. And this is the part of the paragraph where meanings become muddled and mangled, bubbling and splatting in this unstirred cauldron of thought.

Black Friday is supposed to be good. It’s not the Good Friday of that other, real holiday. But it is good in that merchants get their books into the black, out of the red2 against the backdrop of goodwill, joy, charity and all that stuff we are supposed think about when we are not flipping each other off in the parking lots, this most wonderful time of year.

Black Friday, deals included, comes only once a year. Whereas the infamous Black Monday of whenever it was a couple of decades ago comes only every couple of decades or so. The black of that day is not so good.

None of the blacknesses of these days comes close in gravity or connotation as the blackness of Thursdays in Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, so clearly explained on page 37 of that book in the chapter:

The Watermelon Sun

I woke up before Pauline and put on my overalls. A crack of gray

sun shone through the window and lay quietly on the floor. I

went over and put my foot in it, and then my foot was gray.

I looked out the window and across the fields and piney woods

and the town to the Forgotten Works. Everything was touched

with gray: Cattle grazing in the fields and the roofs of the shacks

and the big Piles in the Forgotten Works all looked like dust.

The very air itself was gray.

We have an interesting thing with the sun here. It shines a

different color every day. No one knows why this is, not even

Charley. We grow the watermelons in different colors the best

we can.

This is how we do it: Seeds gathered from a gray watermelon

picked on a gray day and then planted on a gray day will make

more gray watermelons.

It is really very simple. The colors of the days and the watermelons

go like this–

Monday: red watermelons.

Tuesday: golden watermelons.

Wednesday: gray watermelons.

Thursday: black, soundless wateimelons.

Friday: white watermelons.

Saturday: blue watermelons.

Sunday: brown watermelons.

Today would be a day of gray watermelons. I like best tomorrow:

the black, soundless watermelon days. When you cut them

they make no noise, and taste very sweet.

They are very good for making things that have no sound.

I remember there was a man who used to make clocks from the

black, soundless watermelons and his clocks were silent.

The man made six or seven of these clocks and then he died.

There is one of the clocks hanging over his grave. It is hanging

from the branches of an apple tree and sways in the winds

that go up and down the river. It of course does not keep time

any more.

Pauline woke up while I was putting my shoes on.

“Hello,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “You’re up. I wonder

what time it is.”

“It’s about six.”

“I have to cook breakfast this morning at ideath,” she said.

“Come over here and give me a kiss and then tell me what you

would like for breakfast.”

Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see what they have at the food court at the mall.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

  1. No it isn’t. Is it? If so, and if she were my age, her hair would probably be gray, not only for her age but as part of the price of being my true love. My true love, my dear wife, grows hair of chestnut auburn, graying, alas, as are my own temples, as is the temple in which we married. [↩]
  2. one of the colors so overly displayed throughout the presently arriving holiday season [↩]
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One Comment

  1. J.M.
    Posted 10 November 2009 at 14:52 | Permalink

    How do you remember things like RB’s watermelon colors? Brings back a flood of memories, all of which are tinged with green, like the flow of the algae filled waters of the rivers we knew as South Texas children, between our toes, under them…Wenesdays are always Orange to me. Thursdays red. Tuesdays pale turquoise. Mondays bright yellow. Sundays are white and Saturdays are sky-blue. We don’t know why that is, but i think some of us have this synergist brain wiring issue where days also have textures associated with them. Wed,/Thurs are my autumn days. It’s as if they exist in their best garb when they occur in the autumn. Maybe the orange/red color associations stem from that.

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