My Time Of Day

Photo Credit: Sonja Langford

I grew up living next door to a baker. My brother and I and all our friends were cautioned frequently about excess noise after a certain point in the evening so our neighbor’s sleep wouldn’t be disturbed. He got up really early to go to work. I have always been a fairly early riser, never given to sleeping in, and I wake up really quickly. I’m a lark, in common parlance, not an owl like other others I know. When I was a boy, though, my baker neighbor’s early rising was another whole universe to me. I imagined that his life and work were mostly in the darkness. There was a whole world out there of people who work in the night and do things like restock grocery stores and staff hospitals and keep their eyes on our country’s defense that I didn’t know about yet.

I have a memory of him related to the first time I ever baked a pie. My mom had gotten gift of a bag of pecans from her friend in Alabama and one day we decided to make pecan pies together. It went along as planned until the very end, when it was evident that my mom’s pecans were on the surface, like they’re supposed to be, and mine were just under the surface. Our neighbor the baker had gotten home from work and we asked him what could possibly have happened. His opinion was that maybe I beat the eggs too much. I never checked that out, but trusted his appraisal as a professional. This was my first experience ever with the reality that just because you follow a recipe to the letter, whatever you’re making is not necessarily going to turn out right. Who would know not to beat the eggs too much? It doesn’t say that in any recipe I’ve ever seen for pecan pie.

It was also an early experience in my learning that people could get up at ungodly hours in the morning and be productive. Now, more than ever, that’s my life, too. I have less and less interest in being out at night, preferring to get to bed early and get up really early. Not everyone can write in the morning, but that is my preference. You have to find your own time. It’s hard to tell what attracts The Muse on any given day. Showing up every day is paramount, and I do that. It’s inviolate.

I noticed that one blessing of the winter months is actually longer darkness in the morning. It helps me a lot to have dark and quiet, like the soil in which seeds germinate. I am really grateful for that realization. To be heading into the long winter where the long shadow of night extends far into the morning and be truly be grateful on a personal level for how much longer I can keep the world at bay. That has seldom happened to me this early in the season. To see darkness as a blessing, not a curse, and be thankful for winter in a whole new way.

Sometimes awareness of blessings just has to be personal, whether someone else shares it or not. Each of us has to find a reason, and mine may not be yours.Kind of like Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls when he sings “My time of day is the dark time. A couple of deals before dawn when the street belongs to the cop and the janitor with the mop and the grocery clerks are all gone. When the smell of the rain washed pavement comes up clean, and fresh, and cold. And the streetlamp light fills the gutter with gold.”

Notes From The GratiDude

Biweekly musings on gratitude from the GratiDude

Craig "The GratiDude" Jones

Written by

I am pursuing An Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired Life

Notes From The GratiDude

Biweekly musings on gratitude from the GratiDude

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