A Laid-Back Agenda for a Found Holiday

This is a unique day. Because Thanksgiving is the only holiday that always falls on a Thursday, the Friday After Thanksgiving is a kind of bonus for the people who are lucky enough to be given--or just take--it off. A found holiday, a delayed Thanksgiving dessert.

Perhaps the best thing about it is that there is no agenda. Thanksgiving dinner is over and gone, and the leftovers are safely in the freezer. The football on TV is not compelling. Weekend chores can be put off until Saturday. There are no urgent demands on time.

Under such circumstances, taking care of mundane tasks would be almost obscene. Rather like getting a cheese sandwich at the Ritz or reading a comic book at the Grand Canyon or thinking about a household budget at the Bolshoi. Such a gift as the Friday After Thanksgiving should be unwrapped slowly and lovingly. So before you mess it up with trivialities or unnecessary stress, stop and think about its possibilities.

I have--and I’ve got the day beautifully planned. More than I can do, really, but that’s all right. I’ll enjoy the buffet, even if I can’t eat of it all.

First of all, I’m going to read The Times. In the morning. All the way through. Normally after I check the scores in the sports section, I don’t get back to the rest of the paper until about midnight. On the Friday After Thanksgiving, I will read it cover-to-cover in bed with two cups of coffee.

Then I’ll have to do some picking and choosing from the following list of activities normally impossible in the overheated, supercharged lifestyle required to make a living in Orange County today:

For almost a year, I’ve had half a dozen Christmas cards sitting on my desk, stamped and addressed to people scattered about the country. Because these are close friends, I didn’t want to accompany a printed message with a perfunctory note. I will write them news and profound thoughts, I told myself. Make a real connection.

Well, the cards still sit atop my desk, and today I will phone all of these people. I won’t try to explain. Just let them know I care--and make promises that it won’t happen again, which both of us know I’m probably incapable of keeping.

The bottom drawer of my desk is crammed with photographs of everything from the ’84 Olympics to my grandchildren building a snowman. On the floor behind my desk is a photo album my wife gave me for Christmas, 1987. I intend to rent a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie--probably “Follow the Fleet,” which has a great closing number by Irving Berlin called “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” that is very vivid to me, even though I don’t think I’ve seen it since World War II. And while I’m watching the movie, I will at least start to put some of that mountain of snapshots into an album.

Take a walk--hopefully with my family, including Coco the bubble-headed dachshund who will joyfully plow a furrow through the gutters with her nose. We will walk through what used to be the wilds of the Back Bay until developers built high-priced condominiums and a Marriott Hotel there. But we can still find some reasonably virgin brush to prowl and air to sniff--and if no one else cares to go, Coco and I will plow and sniff.

I have 17 New Yorkers and 22 New Republics (I counted them last week to find out exactly what I was facing) piled beside my bed unread. Sometime today, I will move those piles to a chair in a patch of sunlight and read at least the top magazine on each pile.

When I saw my oldest grandson a few weeks ago, he made me promise to finish a story I started writing for him when he was 5. He is now 11. I will try to find the story in my files, which I see as the imperative first step to finishing it.

My wife and I will have a cocktail hour. At cocktail time. And by way of celebration, I’ll have my martini straight up instead of on the rocks.

Within the past few weeks, we have acquired in our neighborhood a new baby next door and two doors down a grandfather recently and triumphantly home after two difficult months in the hospital. They need to be visited over a glass of wine and good talk.

My doctor sent me a blistering note after a recent blood test, saying that she felt “very strongly” about my inflated cholesterol, which I had brought down and then allowed to zoom up again. I haven’t had an egg--which I love--since. On this day, I will have a fried egg for breakfast--over easy and fringed around the edges.

One thing I positively will not do on the Friday After Thanksgiving--and my wife is in complete accord on this one--is to get within 5 miles of a shopping mall. We get plenty of stress on the other 364 days of the year. We don’t plan to go out looking for it on this accidental holiday.

Another thing I will not do is eat turkey left over from Thanksgiving dinner. I figure it should survive nicely in the freezer until about mid-May--when I might consider eating it again.

The evening will be devoted to whatever is left of the activities described above--give or take a few catnaps. Then for the piece de resistance, I have a videotape of last Saturday’s USC-UCLA game. Just before I go to bed, I will look at the last quarter again. Even though I didn’t want USC to win (and they keep winning on the damned videotape), it seems a fitting way to cap off this special day.