What is it about Sundays?

They usually start fine: Liane Hansen and the estimable Will Shortz on the radio, a few cups of coffee with my weekly dose of network TV bloviation, followed by a Bach cantata or a Haydn mass on the stereo, and then an hour or so with The New York Times.

But somewhere during the late morning or early afternoon, a weight begins to settle on my chest, a pervasive melancholy that evolves over the next few hours into something worse, a feeling of...I don't want to call it depression, since that's become a diagnostic category and may not apply, but certainly a burdensome and occasionally almost immobilizing despondency. It's a feeling unique to Sunday, distinctly different from any sadness that might be felt on any other day of the week. It's predictable, for one thing, and it covers the day in a gelatinous gray fog, it sucks joy and energy out of every endeavor.

And I suspect I'm not the only one subject to it.

But the reasons for it elude me. When I first started to experience it--I think it was as far back as the fifth grade--it didn't seem mysterious at all. School was going to resume the next morning, and I disliked school. Reason enough. In junior high, there was added to this the realization that I hadn't done my weekend homework when I should have and would now have to do all of it after Sunday Night at the London Palladium (England's amateurish answer to the Ed Sullivan Show) ended at ten. In high school, there was added to these other things the distress about all my grand hopes for the weekend having come to naught.