My Morning Art

Originally Posted Tuesday, January 7, 2014

A day back to the factory, the gym, and the nightly ritual, and by 8:30 I wanted to go to bed.  Is it from fatigue or boredom?  I had no creative impulses, no desire to read.  It seemed to me to be dark enough for sleep.  The temperature outside was dropping, the wind picking up.  No one to call, no one to write.  I did, of course, have pressing things to take care of, and perhaps it was that--the need to do something--that promoted my lethargy.  Or, just as likely, I have the old man's disease. 

Woke up this morning in the cold, pitch blackness.  Maybe I look forward far too much to coffee in the morning, that and the sweet potato bread (or the cinnamon pecan ring or some other starchy sweetness) that I have begun to consume to add the calories that are missing from my alcohol-free diet.  I do look forward to that so, even as I climb into bed at night.  Maybe I go to bed early because I want so much for morning to come. 

I prefer morning to the darkness.  There is something grand for me in the new beginning.  Even as a kid, I would love to stay home from school and watch the day pass by from the couch, the incredible difference that each hour brought, the sensual feel of it.  It was the most communal I ever felt, maybe, being alone and sharing the day with housewives who I knew were feeling the same thing I was at each moment.  They had to.  There was a rhythm we shared, dreading the return of the daily workers coming home from the artificial grind, bringing their off-kilter, inorganic emotions back to the house that had been so wonderfully peaceful and free.  There was, I knew then and know now, some hideous deformation that came from bending your hours to someone else's will.  That my father had someone who could tell him what to do and when was terrible, I thought.  My mother, too. 

I didn't understand, of course, what it took to keep the household running, to pay for the house, the electric, the food, the t.v. 

I know now.  It is wrong. 

I am back bending my will to someone else's desires.  I must deform myself daily.  It is hideously wrong, the wrongfulness of it accumulating with the years until the weight of the bending and the years becomes unbearable. 

But mornings there is coffee and now the starchy-sweet thing that I allow myself to eat.  It is as good as poetry and literature and painting.  It is art.