Another Saturday night ...

Does there always come a time in your life when you no longer think of Saturday night as "date night," or even as anything special?

For most of my single years -- especially the 12 or so between my two marriages -- I worked on Friday nights and had Saturday nights off. That's the way it is for a lot of sportswriters; Friday nights are busy, Saturday nights not so much. And on several of the stops along my career highway, I wasn't enjoying my Saturdays all that much.

I don't think I had one date during my nine months in South Carolina, and I seem to recall my first year in St. Louis being a relative wasteland in that area as well. As Woody Allen once quipped in<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069097/"> "Play it Again Sam,"</a> my sex life was turning into the petrified forest.

[caption id="attachment_395" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Play it Again Sam"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/play_it_again_sam.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-395" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/play_it_again_sam-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

During my first marriage and the early years of my second marriage, we usually went out on Saturday night. Most of the time it was dinner and a movie, although sometimes we ate at home and then went to the movie after dinner.

But movies started getting really expensive. They're at the point now where two tickets to a first-run film cost more than buying it on DVD a few months later, and it just isn't as important to me as it once was to see a movie when it first comes out.

Heck, I still haven't seen any of the three "Lord of the Rings" movies, and after busting my hump in the '80s to see "Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" on the first day they were out, I not only saw the last three "Star Wars" movies on DVD, I didn't watch the last one until I'd had the DVD for more than a year.

Saturday night eventually became a night to rest and recover for the week ahead. Instead of living for the weekend, I was doing what I could to recharge my batteries on the weekend.

Here in Texas, that has been essential. I've been dieting all week and exercising from Monday through Saturday. By the end of the day Saturday, I'm exhausted. I fall into bed with a novel, sleep in on Sunday morning and then spend Sunday storing up energy for Monday, when it starts all over again.

Another Saturday night ...

A blessing of a different sort.