Dear Morning Person, go back to bed!
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
The day was new and I was up and off like a herd of turtles — with arthritis.
There are annoying people who pop out of bed in the morning like breakfast pastries in the toaster. I want to slap them with a soggy pancake.
As the old saying goes, “I’m not really a morning person; I’m a morning survivor.”
If it wasn’t for the fact that I have a 60-something-year-old bladder, I’d probably still be in bed right now. Once I get my pillow positioned just right, I see no reason to disturb perfection.
In college, I once signed up for a 7:45 a.m. class. I nearly flunked. It wasn’t because the class was difficult. Actually, it might have been, but I wouldn’t know. I rarely rolled out of bed in time to find out.
The irony — or perhaps revenge of the professor — was that in my first job out of college, I was expected to be at the office at 6:30 a.m.
I didn’t know that there were two 5:30s in a day. I’d only seen the one that happened around supper time. That there’s a 5:30 that happens before the sun comes up was surprise.
It turns out that there really is a 5:30 that occurs in the a.m. I am not making this up.
I and several of my cohorts would stumble, bumble and shuffle into the building, grunt greetings if we felt up to it, then clack away at our keyboards. We weren’t sure what, if anything, showed up on our screens. We couldn’t even be positive that we’d bumped the “on” buttons.
Nobody talked. For all I know, no one even opened their eyes.
Then came Dawn.
I don’t mean morning. Our section of the building had no windows. Who knows when came that dawn.
No, we were afflicted by a sunny young co-worker named Dawn — a morning person.
I’d heard that Morning Persons existed, though up until then, I’d never seen one in the wild. I thought they were a myth: Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Easter Bunny, Morning Person.
Dawn bubbled into the office every morning, all smiles and cheer. Dawn was naturally bright, beautiful and blessed.
It was disgusting.
There we were, content in our gloom and grumpiness, and then this basket full of morning dew, sunflowers and positive energy lit up our desolate workplace.
“It’s a wonderful morning,” she’d gush. “The sun is warm, the sky is blue, the birds are singing…”
Yeah, because the birds don’t have to go to work.
“… and I just know that it will be another wonderful, wonderful day.”
Some people just don’t know how to be happy, and by happy, I mean wallowing in a comforting quilt of morning blahs, boring routine and unattainable potential.
This is not, as Morning Persons claim, a defeatist attitude. It’s quite the opposite. If you go into the day expecting the worst, you’re never disappointed with the outcome and have a much greater chance of being pleasantly surprised.
But if you’re a cheery Morning Person with sparkles dancing in your eyes, always expecting the absolute best, you have nowhere to go but down. Morning Persons must suffer tons more disappointment than do we Grouchy Gusses. That’s the guess of this Grumpy Gus.
But I’m learning to become more open-minded. I even have a couple of friends now who are openly Morning Persons, and I’m OK with that—as long as they do that nonsense someplace else and let me sleep.
Morning Person, I’ll see you at noon. On second thought, let’s make it 2 p.m. That’s morning enough for me.
Actually, 2 p.m. is when Cole takes his first afternoon nap. Wake him at news@falmouthoutlook.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.