Early To Rise

For as long as I can remember I have risen early in the morning, sometimes as early as 5:30 AM during the summer months when we were off from school. This meant if nobody else was awake, usually the case, I would venture down to the coolest room in our home: the basement. Before we added central air conditioning in 1975, the basement could be relied upon as the one place we could go, that wasn't a swimming pool, to escape the heat. When it was too hot to be in the basement we would often rely upon an old standby and run through the sprinkler while it watered the lawn. Once we had been thoroughly soaked by the sprinkler we were game for more strenuous activities like a squirt gun fight or simply throwing balloons filled with water at each other.

When I was up and about early on those summer mornings my attention sometimes turned to what was on TV at that hour. Some channels were still running a test pattern until 6 AM but one of them had a cartoon show called Colonel Bleep, which I guess was supposed to get us accustomed to the forthcoming modern era of space travel. It was then followed by an early morning fixture called The Modern Farmer. I fully understood why they showed The Modern Farmer at such an early hour because farmers were people who generally woke even earlier than I did. What I didn't understand was why it was on at all, given that such a small percentage of people were classified as farmers and the information provided by the show was not anything these people didn't already know backwards and forwards. I knew that I lived in the Garden State and that we even had a working farm in Ridgewood into the late 1970s but the show always appeared incongruous with our suburban life style.

I will say that my ability to rise early did stand me in good stead when I went off to college and 8:00 AM classes were sometimes all that were left for Freshmen to choose from. They used to kid us that these classes were lessons in how to get up early that would come in handy when we found our first 9 to 5 job, which probably would require it.

Truth be told it was probably not TV which caused a life long habit of rising with the sun. It had more to do with the fact that I liked the sounds of the birds in the morning and the predictable sounds we used to hear at our house like the long, lonesome moan of a train whistle, or the clanging of cans by our garbageman. These sounds because they were so predictable and regular soothed me as I began my day. I have all these same sounds outside my window now here in Forest Hills, NY but they don't resonate with me in the same manner. I have certainly gotten used to them but these sounds are more shrill and faster paced. Nothing like the slow and easy pace we lived growing up in Ridgewood in the 1960s and 1970s.