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Early to bed, early to rise, is fine with me
By Carl Heintze
I like getting up early. By early I mean between 5 and 7 a.m. The world is quiet then except for the mockingbirds, which make so many different sounds you think a whole aviary is outside your window.
I pad around the house in the dawn, peering out the windows to see if anything unusual has happened outside during the night. It almost never has. That's reassuring, as if the world will never change.
I sneak outside in my night clothes, hoping no one else is up and pick up the paper from the driveway.
I come back inside, thankful that it is warmer inside than out, get my bowl of cold cereal (I like to think it is less fattening because it is cold, even though I know I'm only kidding myself), warm up my coffee in the microwave, put a couple of pieces of toast in the toaster oven and then in blissful silence chomp away while I'm reading about the disasters of the day before.
Somehow that not only fills my stomach, it makes me think I'm whole, as if by reading the paper that early I have managed to beat the rest of the world to the beginning of the day.
There's a certain wonder in all this wonderful solitude. Oh, I know, no one is talking to me over or through the paper and that's selfish, but somehow it also is very soothing. I get to meet the new day on my own terms and no one else's. There will be time enough in the hours ahead to check out the tasks of the coming day, to answer the telephone, to get done the things that have to be done this day. That's the wonderful part of getting up early.
I have to add that I didn't get used to getting up early without a struggle. For 30 years or so I had to get up early because I worked on an afternoon newspaper (now an institution that thanks to television has all but disappeared).
Afternoon news people get up early and quit in mid-afternoon. Morning paper people get up late, work until midnight or later and then try to sleep through the morning. I never could get used to that routine.
I also have to confess that as the years progress, getting up early is no longer easy in the winter and late fall. Then one arises in the dark and it stays dark much longer. Somehow the magic of the morning isn't there.
The birds aren't singing, you can't even see across the street and the comfort of the comforter is more enticing than the comfort of knowing you are up and moving in a new day.
And there are a couple of other caveats, too. The old adage attributed, I think, to Benjamin Franklin--early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise--is at least partly true. If you're going to get up early, you have to go to bed early.
The older one gets, the more sleep is required to make one turn back the bedclothes and stand erect. And the greater is the tendency to what I guess you could call senile insomnia. Older people sleep in shorter stretches. Certainly I do. If I sleep more than four hours at one time, I wake up wondering what's wrong.
When I was a teenager, I used to sleep solidly through at least eight hours, but for many reasons sleeping longer is not a good sign when you're older.
My other caveat, I am sorry to say, is that even though I get up early and eat my breakfast these days, I find I often somehow seem to wander back to bed. Then I sleep another hour and wake up with the rest of the world.
That's not all bad, though. I figure I needed the sleep and I know that when I wake up I've already heard most of the news others are only now going to get.
I don't know exactly why this seems such a triumph. I suppose it has something to do with once having gotten up early to gather and produce the news. Or maybe it is just a basic insecurity, my way of dealing with the world on my own terms.
Whatever it is, I'm happy to forgo The Tonight Show, Nightline and Letterman. I'm willing to tape those movies that end at 11 p.m. on our VCR. At parties that last beyond 9:30 p.m. I'm willing to be the yawning dud in the corner waiting to go home.
Getting up early is my avoidance of the late-night life much of the rest of the world likes to lead.
I hope I can keep it that way.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
