Sleeping Late

"The bed is a bundle of paradoxes:

we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret;

we make up our minds every night to leave it early,

but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late."

-- Rev. Charles Caleb Colton, 

Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words:

Addressed to Those Who Think

Dismantled alarm clock 10-1-14

"The alarm in the morning? 

Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting

the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent 

version of Schubert's seventh symphony.

And I've rigged it up so that exactly 7:30 every morning

it falls from the ceiling onto my face."

-- Stephen Fry

"If people were meant to pop out of bed,

we'd all sleep in toasters."

-- Unknown

Cake For Breakfast

"Muffins are for people who don't have the nads

to order cake for breakfast."

-- Kitchen Confidential

Red velvet cake scraps with milk 9-28-14

"Shep claimed eating cake like that so early in the morning

was a 'whore's breakfast.'

The rest of them didn't care.

They were happy little whores who didn't worry about saving a morsel."

-- Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

We had dinner last night with my beautiful friend Kelly, who happens to be a professional pastry chef. 

Kelly operates her own very successful up-and-coming bakery in Providence, RI, but she was home in Ohio over the weekend to be in a friend's wedding, for which she also made the cake.

When professional cake designers build cakes, a lot of the cake falls victim to long, sharp, serrated knives they use to shave and shape the cakes into perfect rounds and squares with perfectly flat sides and tops.

All of the discarded, trimmed-off cake becomes cake scraps.

I worked with Kelly in a local bakery a few years ago, and when there were cake scraps, she'd send them home with me in fondant buckets for the boys. They'd eat it right out of the buckets with their fingers.

I don't see Kelly as often anymore since she moved to Rhode Island. But yesterday she showed up at the restaurant with a cooler full of scraps from the wedding cake she'd made. She brought them all the way from Providence -- about eight pounds of red velvet, lemon, and pumpkin scraps -- enough to make a whole other cake.

When we got home, we immediately dug in. Red velvet cake is a little too messy to eat with your hands, so we scooped it into cereal bowls, covered it with milk and ate it with spoons. It was sweet and squishy and turned the milk delightfully pink.

It wasn't exactly breakfast. It was 10 p.m. And we weren't exactly hungry. We'd eaten huge dinners.

But it was cake.

There's always room for cake, no matter what time it is.

This morning when I got up I found tell-tale red velvet crumbs in the sink, and the milk was all gone. So I'm pretty sure I know what the boys had for breakfast.

Anybody who's ever heard Bill Cosby's schtick about eating cake for breakfast knows it's perfectly acceptable because it's got eggs, milk and wheat. As Cos says, "That's nutrition!"

I don't let my family eat cake for breakfast every day. Sometimes I let them eat cookies and brownies. I blame my grandmother, who always had to have "a little something sweet" with her morning coffee -- donuts, sweet rolls, apple fritters.

Nutritionally speaking, perhaps cake isn't the best breakfast.

Deliciously speaking, it's about as good as it gets.

The Dawn Chorus

 "And even the sun in dawn chorus sings,

a celestial melody to the earth below."

-- Tjaden

Robin and branches (cut paper) 8-15-15

"The best time to hear bird song is at dawn.

The dawn chorus is one of the marvels of nature."

-- Gareth Huw Davies, "Bird Songs," PBS.org

"And the songbirds are singing,
like they know the score."

-- Fleetwood Mac, "Songbird"

My bed is in the basement.

Which is great for keeping my erratic sleep habits, torrential tossing and night-time wanderings from waking the rest of the sleepers in the house.

It's a good environment for sleep.

It's very cool down there. It's very dark down there. It's very quiet down there. 

And if a tornado hits, I'm good to go.

However, there are drawbacks.

The only windows in the basement are two tiny high-up ones resting at the top of the cinder block basement walls, at the foundation of the house. 

They don't let in much daylight. They don't open. 

They're sealed shut, kind of like prison windows, except without the bars. 

I don't mind not seeing much from my basement bedroom. What I do mind, however, is not hearing much. Since I set up camp there a year or so ago, I've seriously missed falling asleep to the sounds of night -- rain, storms, distant train whistles. 

Mostly, though, I've missed the early morning wake-up call of songbirds in the treetops.

It's called the dawn chorus. 

It starts out simply. One bird calls. Another answers. A few more get in on the conversation, and pretty soon it's a cacophony of bird sound heralding the dawn of another new day.

The whole thing only lasts a few minutes, but it's beautiful, and it's the sound I've missed the most since I went underground.

My husband wasn't home last night, so there was no risk of waking him with my sheet-tangling "crocodile death roll" (as he calls it). So I slept in the big bed in the upstairs bedroom with both windows flung open wide.

This morning I heard it.

If I knew the bird call for "it sounded good," I'd tweet it.

And for all of you sleepers-in ...

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Time for a One Good Thing "How to hear the dawn chorus without having to wake up at the ass crack of dawn" bonus sound clip. 

Just click here!

That First Cup Of Coffee In The Morning

"I'd rather take coffee than compliments just now."

-- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Morning coffee 8-8-14

"Want coffee?" I asked.

"It's three thirty in the morning."

"Okay. Want coffee?"

-- Darynda Jones, Third Grave Dead Ahead

"It burned, but I didn't give a damn.

I held the cup to my chest as if it were my most special friend

while feeling the instant affect the coffee had on my mood and I smiled."

-- Ethan Day, Life in Fusion

Morning Glories At My Window

"Be willing to be a beginner every single morning."

-- Meister Eckhart

Morning Glory 7-25-14

"A morning glory at my window satisfies me 

more than the metaphysics of books."

-- Walt Whitman

Earlier this spring Leo planted some pots full of flower seeds.

One pot has been growing stalky sunflowers.

Another contains a crazy wildflower blend.

My favorite, though, are the Morning Glories. They're in the pot with the tall, fragile, willowy tangle of green vines and heart-shaped leaves winding their way up slender stakes, reaching for the sky. The first two buds on this one finally unfurled yesterday morning, so that the first thing I saw when I looked out the kitchen window were the fresh, wide-open faces of two Morning Glory blooms.

It made me feel good.

I think I might have said something like "Hey, Morning Glories! There you are! I've been waiting for you."

Morning Glories are smart flowers. They take advantage of the early morning sun to get their blooming done, and as the afternoon wanes and evening falls, they wisely close up shop and turn in early, somehow re-wrapping their papery, fluttery, blue and purple petals back inside that tight pointy whorl where they rest all night.

When they wake well-rested the next morning, they are bright eyed -- literally -- with a light-up yellow center that practically glows with brightness and hope and encouragement.

The hopeful presence of these flowers makes me feel like I might just have a chance of getting a re-start on some stuff I've been fucking up and stumbling over lately. 

Leo's Morning Glories remind me every morning that it's never too late to start over, to try again, to go back to the beginning and give it another shot. 

Morning after morning after morning after morning.