Halfway down the Danube

Mornings

I used to hate mornings.

I like staying up late at night. I'm not even going to try defending or explaining that. The hours between 10 pm and 1 am are just a particularly sweet part of the day for me. Seems to be pretty deeply wired.

I like staying up late at night, and I like sleeping. If I don't get enough sleep, I get dopey and easily distracted. Also, I'm just unhappy. I miss getting enough sleep. I miss it like you miss... something you really miss a lot. You know. Like that.

So, hardwired night owl + need my sleep = don't much like getting up early in the morning. I can tolerate it if I can get a nap in the afternoon, but there's this thing called "work" that somewhat complicates that. Once in a while I can slink home for a long lunch hour, but, you know, when you're the boss that's actually harder. When you're an employee you just have to avoid the boss's attention. When you're the boss, you have to somehow avoid everyone's attention. I'm not complaining, just saying that the afternoon naps are not so easy to come by.

Up to now, having small children hasn't made any of this better.

But. The last couple of weeks, I've been taking Alan to the bus stop in the mornings. It's about a three, four block walk, a few hundred meters. We cross over the railroad tracks, sit on a bench outside a little dentist's office, and wait a few minutes for the school bus.

And, you know, the mornings recently have been nice. It's early autumn and the morning air is crisp, pleasantly cool. We leave the house right around sunrise, and damn if the sunrises haven't been consistently spectacular. Pink clouds and rays of glory in the east, Mount Ararat, snow-capped, like a fallen piece of heaven itself in the south. Doves coo and burble in the trees. Alan and I stop for a moment to look at rose hips, the thorns on a berry bush, the rusty spikes at the rail crossing. A building that's being torn down. Ants. Some hexagonal tiles on the ground. The waning half moon.

This is probably the longest period of time I've spent up in the early morning since... oh, college maybe? When I used to get up at 6 am to paint houses. (Long story.) Otherwise, I've spent much of my adult life avoiding situations that would consistently require me to be up with the sun, never mind before. I mean, avoiding early mornings was really a significant motivation in my life for a long, long time.

Brief digression here about Armenia: it's at the far west edge of its time zone. Like, way far west. Armenia should be in the same time zone as its neighbors Georgia and Turkey, but the Armenians do things differently, so they're an hour ahead. So 8 am here is really 7 am. (As witnessed by the fact that the sun is just coming up.)

So physically, biologically, I'm waking up around 6 and walking Alan to school around 7. Which, while not exactly farmers hours, is something new and different for an habitual night owl.

But, you know, it's not so bad.

I'm still tired: let's be clear on that. Still dopey and distracted. It's still damn hard for me to force myself to bed before midnight. Which means I steadily build up a sleep deficit all week... and that's in a best-case scenario, where no small child has a bad dream at 1 am, an accident in bed at 2 am, or just desperately needs to come into bed and snuggle with Mommy and Daddy at 4 am. Since stuff like that happens a lot, I'm dopey and sluggish more mornings than not.

Still: at the age of forty-two, I've discovered that it's not mornings I hate. No.

Mornings can be okay. Nice, even.

It's getting up in the morning that's the hard part.

Posted by douglas at September 16, 2006 09:10 PM