September 3, 2008
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The Daily News
1 Yesterday morning I awoke early enough that I thought it would be a good idea to write today's DN and clear the boards.
2 I had just gone through a series of morning rituals that left me somewhat bemused, since normally I am what you would call a morning person.
3 The three-day holiday is always a bit of an anomaly to me anyway since I really don't think that this early in the season we should be getting a vacation. Seems to me we just had a three-month vacation, and for a guy raised with a tremendous work ethic, I always get guilty about Labor Day.
4 Consequently I never sleep too well on the Monday coming out of the Labor Day weekend. I guess it's a guilt thing, or maybe it's just that I'm anxious to begin getting into a ritual with my classes.
5 Truth be told, I just didn't sleep at all on Monday night.
6 I had one of those nights when you think you're awake all night long even though you get periodic cat naps.
7 I finally pulled out of bed when my mind had had enough, and I moved swiftly to the bathroom to take my morning shower.
8 Some people need coffee to get going in the morning; I need to shower so that I start each day fresh as a daisy.
9 Now I have this grand old black cat named Todd. He never was really what you would call a nimble cat, but he's gotten up there in years and now lumbers about, a good old fellow who loves to give me a head-butt or five each morning, followed by a pacing back and forth on the sink, with a few meows thrown in. Good guy, really.
10 Well, the other morning when I started to get into the bathroom, I had forgotten something and needed to go out to the garage, but I knew that if I left the door open, Todd would do his morning ritual, which consisted of jumping on the toilet seat and then leaping from there to the sink, where I would need to turn the faucet on at just the right trickle so Todd could have some water.
11 And yes, he has a bowl, but he insists on taking his morning dose from the faucet. If I don't have the faucet trickling at just the right speed, he'll meow me until I get it right.
12 Because of my lack of sleep, I wasn't about to allow that to happen. I closed the bathroom door before heading for the garage, leaving the old guy to pace in the hallway.
13 I dashed to the garage to get some things out of the dryer and decided to go out the gate and pick up the Merc News, and then back inside to make some coffee.
14 By the time I got back to the bathroom I noticed that the door was completely closed. Assuming someone else had gotten up, I moved out to the computer to write the DN.
15 Around a half hour later everybody started getting up. I asked who had been in the shower and nobody had, so for the first half hour of the morning I had simply sat and written the DN figuring that I should use my time wisely.
16 What I didn't calculate was that when I closed the door, it closed all the way, making it look to everybody getting up as though SOMEBODY was in the bathroom.
17 I walked down the hall and as I moved, Todd followed me down, at this point reprimanding me for leaving him for so lengthy a time. He meowed me all the way down the hall and into the bathroom, which had not yet been used by a human soul.
18 I opened the door, put the seat down on the toilet (Todd insists) and helped the guy up to the sink, where he proceeded to instruct me on how he wanted the trickle of water to go down.
19 At that point, I went to the kitchen to make coffee, then out to the backyard to water the garden and finally back to the living room to finish up the DN.
20 Naturally this delayed my departure, causing some tremendous consternation, but I felt good that my priority was the cat and not my students.
21 On the way to school, I hit every light in the South Bay, and at least three people attempted to kill me by speeding or tailgating, a natural phenomenon in San Jose.
22 One guy pulled in front of me and decided to go around 12 MPH below the speed limit, totally in the fast lane.
23 My daughters and I always had this bit of a joke about people who would weave in and out of traffic, impatient drivers. When I trained my daughters to drive, I would always point out impatient drivers who would speed past us. I would always relax, look at those drivers and say, "Where ya goin'? WHERE YA GOIN'? SEE YOU AT THE LIGHT." We would then watch the imbecile weave in and out and almost kill everybody only to get stopped at the next traffic signal.
24 We'd always secretly laugh as the guy would screech his tires the second the light would turn green, and I would just raise my eyebrows with a tacit look to my daughters, a look that would say that same thing all over again, and sure enough the guy would be 100 yards ahead of us only to be stopped at the next traffic signal.
25 And we would always roll up and glance at the guy just to see what an imbecile looks like.
26 But yesterday, after the entire Todd morning, I was around six minutes late when this guy in a beat-up old Toyota pulled in front of me and decided to roll along so slowly that I became goofy. I turned my lights on hoping to give the guy a hint, but he was in a Zen state. I thought about my driving lessons but after around two miles of this guy I finally zipped past him on the right and thumped it for the next hundred yards.
27 I REALLY wanted the light to turn green because by now I was around seven minutes late and knew I had to find parking as well, but alas!
28 The light turned slowly yellow, and then red. I looked into my rear view and saw the guy approaching, and began thumping my foot, hoping beyond any hope that the light would somehow reward me for my impatience.
29 No go.
30 The guy pulled up, glanced over to see who the imbecile was, and the light magically turned green for all of us.
31 I finally got to the school and parked in front of some house around a quarter of a mile from the school, and by some miracle, I made it on time.
32 I got into my room and my foot hooked all the plugs on my computer, and I forgot to jet to the office to pick up my roll sheets. The bell rang and I had rarely been that unprepared to be in front of people, but I got my acting on and nobody ever really knew about the morning that this morning person had gone through.
33 It wasn't a bad morning, mind you, just one of those mornings. I noticed that on a handout I had made for the department that I had used the wrong "there" on one of the sentences. I had not prepared for number 19 on a MENSA quiz I had given, so I really didn't know how I had gotten the answer a week earlier. During my American Lit class I realized midway through that absolutely nobody was listening to a word I had to say, and by lunch I was in a compete tizzy.
34 Later on we had a meeting, just to prolong the day. The new Activities Director was asked to make a presentation on fiscal responsibility, and for once I began to count my blessings.
35 I no longer had to go through all that. I felt the tensions throughout the presentation, and when I finally got out, I headed back up to my classroom, a large room in a brand new building, complete with air conditioning, a cathedral ceiling and an enormous window overlooking the fields. It is a penthouse compared to the trailer I taught in all those years at YB. I loved Peace 61, don't get me wrong, but there I stood in my new crib overlooking the fields, loving every moment that had come to that moment.
36 I looked back on my day and realized a lot of things.
37 My consciousness expanded. I realized that really, I had kept a certain stability in an old cat's morning. I had learned a bit of my own lesson about taking a bit more time while driving. I had learned the true lesson of "Where ya goin'? Where ya goin'?"
38 See you at the light.
39 When I got home, I hit the gym and thought about things. I finally got home, threw out a barbecue, and sat down to edit the DN.
40 It had disappeared completely.
41 At first I got impatient and upset, but within seconds I saw it as an opportunity to drift off to sleep.
42 I could just awaken at 2 a.m. and tack it out again.
43 Life's too short to do otherwise.
44 It's now done; it's almost 4 a.m., and I'm going to awaken in around three hours to yet another morning.
45 I'm going to awaken newly refreshed.
46 I am, after all, a morning person. You might be, or you might not be. Either way.
47 Enjoy your coffee, or tea, or bagel, and enjoy your day.
48 Live life, love life. Hope this helps.
49 Peace.
~H~
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