Does Anything Interesting Ever Happen on a Tuesday?
Blog 47
“It happened on a Tuesday. Which is weird, ’cos nothing interesting ever happens on a Tuesday. Everyone knows that.”
Character in Alison Carr’s Tuesday
So, this quote comes from a play called Tuesday, a youth-oriented work commissioned for the Connections Festival of the National Theatre (London) for the 2020-21 season, and revived in 2023. I wish I could see a production of this work, because the premise intrigues me. According to the National Theatre website “Tuesday is a play that is light, playful, and nuanced in tone. And a little bit sci-fi. The play centers on an ordinary Tuesday that suddenly turns very weird indeed when a tear rips across the sky over the school yard.” Who wouldn’t think differently about Tuesdays if parallel worlds collided to suck some teachers and students away, raining down a whole new set of people?
Well, today is a Tuesday. After a quick look outside, I see no rip in the firmament. I’m not sure why I chose Tuesdays to publish my blogs that come out every other week. But I do take exception with this play quote proclaiming “nothing interesting ever happens on a Tuesday.” After all: I was born on a Tuesday (January 24)! I’ve always been delighted that — from the traditional nursery rhyme — “Tuesday’s child is full of grace”!
Funny, because the word “Tuesday” is from the Old English word “Tiwesdæg,” which means “Tiw’s day,” or sometimes Tyr, a Germanic god of war and the sky. I remember learning in French that the word “Tuesday” is “Mardi” in that language, also named for a god of war, the Roman’s Mars, from the Latin “dies Martis.” I don’t usually associate grace with war, but maybe there is a connection. In fact, I used to keep my twin grandsons, George and Arthur on Tuesdays from about the time they were born until they started going to pre-school. Those days, as I am now remembering, were filled with both grace and war!
A very heartfelt book and play, Tuesdays with Morrie, shows the importance of this day of the week. The work is about a string of visits on Tuesdays that author Mitch Albom made to his former Brandeis University sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, as the older man was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In Judaism, Tuesday is the second day of the week, and it is believed that God created the waters on this day. In American culture, we have Taco Tuesdays, elections are held on Tuesdays, and, according to some folks, Tuesdays are either the unluckiest or the most productive day of the week.
Tuesdays seem ordinary for most people. The day is not part of a weekend; it’s not “Rainy Monday” or “Hump Day Wednesday” or “Thank God It’s Friday.” But what if Tuesday WAS an important day for someone, a day of repeated anniversaries, a day of deep remembering, a day of accumulated commemorations?
I am reading a book I got for Christmas entitled The Murder of Becket and the Canterbury Shrine by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. Thomas Becket is my saint, and this book was recommended as a wonderful source about his actual martyrdom and the pilgrims’s shrine that grew up in the cathedral where his death took place. In it, Stanley writes the following:
“Tuesday, his friends remarked, had always been a significant day in Becket’s life. On a Tuesday he was born and baptized; on a Tuesday he had fled from Northampton; on a Tuesday he had left the King's court in Normandy; on a Tuesday he had left England on this exile; on a Tuesday he had received warning of his martyrdom in a vision at Pontigny; on a Tuesday he had returned from that exile; it was now on a Tuesday that the fatal hour came; and (as the next generation observed) it was on a Tuesday that his enemy King Henry was buried; on a Tuesday that the martyr’s relics were translated [moved from one place to another]; and Tuesday was long afterwards regarded as the week-day especially consecrated to the saint, with whose fortunes it had thus been so strangely interwoven.”
Since I am thinking about Saint Thomas and Tuesdays, I just got up and looked back in my journal concerning my first trip to England in 1987. I noted that we called ahead to see if there were to be services at Canterbury Cathedral in remembrance of Thomas on December 29, and there were. So on the very day of Becket’s martyrdom, we arose quite early and took a train to Faversham, and then on to Canterbury. There it was, plain to see in my accounting of the journey: it was a Tuesday!
After making our way from the train station to the Cathedral, we attended a 10:15 morning Eucharist with 25 other people in Trinity Chapel, and were served by Archbishop Runcie himself. My head was spinning, thinking of Thomas Becket, the production of Murder in the Cathedral we had designed and directed, my English professor Dr. Golson with whom I studied the Canterbury Tales, and numerous others who had a personal Becket connection with me. I staggered about the streets afterward as though stunned.
I purchased a Saint Thomas medal in the gift shop when we went to a second service that started at 3:30 in the afternoon, a bit before the time of his actual murder. Hundreds of us processed with candles to the martyrdom site where we deposited our still burning remembrances. I was absorbed in reverie the whole train ride back, fingering my Thomas pendant. We went to a pub in London for supper and some slick pickpockets talked to us while surreptitiously trying to lift my purse. I realized what was happening, and “accidentally” spilled my glass of water in the crotch of one of them, spoiling their attempt at robbery, and thereby making Thomas my own patron saint. I know it was he who guarded me.
Ever since that evening, I feel protected when I wear my Saint Thomas medal. Its locket bail is now very thin and worn, so I often pray not to lose my holy armor. However, I did misplace it a while back and have looked for it (at least 10 separate times) for several months since realizing it was missing. After writing the first six paragraphs of this piece, I decided to look for it one more time. Somehow, I went straight to it. On a Tuesday.