By Anita Garner
I’m a morning person, awake before dawn. One thing I’ve learned, if you’re one of us, best keep it to yourself. Night people tend to get touchy about mornings.
My radio and television colleagues who have to get up and warm a microphone and clap on a headset while it’s still dark outside are divided. There are the morning people – a cup of coffee and after some mild grumbling, they’re fine. Then there are the night owls, and for them going to bed between 7-8 PM to get up around 2-3 AM is torture.
When I did morning radio, I dropped off my little girl, still in her pajamas, at the babysitter’s home, where she went right back to sleep while I went to a radio station to power up. I hated having to trundle her around like that, but at least I could get my engines revving.
My blogging buddy, Dave Williams, is the morning man at KLIF, Dallas. You can listen to him weekday mornings. He’s spent a lifetime going to work in the dark, in cities all over the U.S. but you wouldn’t know it from the warmth in the voice you hear coming through your speaker.
It’s nice having friends in different time zones. We morning people can get a conversation going anytime with someone, somewhere. Much as I enjoy my solitary pre-dawn coffee, there’s something cozy and unexpected about looking across the way in the dark and seeing a light pop on. In San Francisco where I lived on Green Street, there was one tall building on Russian Hill among the Victorians and across from me on an upper floor, one window lighted up just as I switched on my lamp. I never needed to meet the keeper of the light. We were already morning buddies.
In Mill Valley, where redwood trees kept our entire Blithedale Canyon neighborhood dark for hours, one lone bicyclist rode past every morning on his way up the mountain with his light blinking in the dark.
We morning people always collect night people who think we’re odd. One night a friend slept on our sofa and when my husband woke, she asked him (about me) does she always sing like that in the morning? Yes, she does. Could you make her stop? In my defense, it was humming.
******
