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Closing the bedroom door behind me, I stagger toward the bathroom, flip the switch, sit down, and drink off the morning glass. Water In, Water Out. I step into the shower, draw the curtain, open the faucet to full hot. In a few moments under the spray I wake more, a song appears in my head, and I croon while performing the laving bits of the shower. Out of the shower, towel wrapped about me, I peer into the mirror for the daily wrinkle, pore, and eyebrow check. This must be performed before insertion of contact lenses: without lenses I can focus between a millimeter past my cornea to about eight inches; with lenses I can't focus comfortably within a foot. I smooth my wrinkles, extract whatever I can from my pores, pluck my eyebrows. I wash my hands, insert my lenses, and smile at myself in the mirror.
Picking up my glass and flipping the switch again, I leave the bathroom, take a step, grab my robe (violet chenille) from its hook on the bedroom door, cross the living room, open the shades, and greet the day. These days, the panes are frosted with the steam from my shower. Having discovered the joy of the fanlight in the stove, I no longer subject my early-morning self to the fluorescent overhead as I enter the kitchen. I like staying in semi-darkness a few minutes more, to prolong my waking. The following is as much muscle memory as turn-off-alarm-take-pill is: Set down pint glass. Open dishwasher, remove two bowls, one rocks glass, and one birdy dish. Run hot water into bowl while taking buddy chow from freezer, scoop breakfast into dish, set dish into hot water to thaw (think of absent microwave). Take measuring cup, open fridge, pour half cup of water from filter into cup while removing apple, orange juice, and yogurt with other hand (think of how stupid I am at 30 years old to have to measure a half cup of water). Fill pint glass with water. Dump half cup of water into saucepan, turn burner to high (think of hypothetical gas stove). From cupboard, remove vitamins, calcium supplement, St. John's wort, packet of instant oatmeal. Empty packet into second bowl. Toss supplements into gaping maw, drink vitamin pint of water. Fill rocks glass with orange juice with one hand while filling the pint glass again. Pour boiling water over oatmeal, stir with one hand and turn off stove with other. Slice apple into bowl while oatmeal reconstitutes. Set yogurt on bar. Swing Brita tank into sink to fill. Stack bowl on pint glass, pick up glass, pick up juice. Navigate to living room, sit self and set bowl and juice on futon and set water on floor. Twenty-two minutes have elapsed since I got up. It is 6:15. I deliberately set the bedroom clock seven minutes faster than CNN, to whose time I set the VCR and television. This is so that I have the illusion of getting up at 6:00, since I consider rising earlier inhuman, but still have enough time not to rush in the morning. I watch CNN while I eat oatmeal, flipping at 6:27 from CNN covering sports to the local news's weather. Sometimes I skim a book if a passage, not a song, came to my head in the shower. (This morning as I inserted my contacts I heard Amy March responding "No, thank you," to a question proposed by Fred Vaughn, instead of the "Yes, thank you" she had longed planned to answer, so I plucked Little Women from the shelf as I entered the living room. But I sang Elvis Costello's "Beyond Belief" in the shower.) Usually I use little light though, in order not to disturb the buddy, who will chirrup. I wake him, I know, but he is content to doze in his cage until RDC gets up, a half hour or more after I leave. I find that oatmeal takes more concentration to eat than toast. I know how to eat toast; it has been my breakfast mainstay since I abandoned Cheerios in middle school or earlier. I don't particularly like oatmeal (a minority view in my household), so I like to make sure I have a chunk of apple in every spoonful. A banana in my oatmeal, and therefore hot, is not to be thought of. A big advantage to oatmeal is that since it is wet, I can save my juice for two luxurious swallows at the end. Then I drain my breakfast pint. I fill the water glass again while running water over my dishes in the sink. Back in the living room, I do a hundred crunches while ruminating what to wear. At 6:40, I return to the bedroom and turn on the closet light to pluck clothes from hangers. RDC will moan and turn over if he's facing the wrong way. Skirt, shirt, vest, blazer, underthings, shoes. Wristwatch. Necklaces from their hooks and earrings from the black velvet board I made in college. Then into living room to dress and drink a dressing pint. Every day, I wear a silver, Shepard Tigger pendant on a smaller box chain and a silver and amethyst talisman on a larger box chain, and one of three standard pairs of earrings, all dangling: goddess earrings of a silver, formalized woman holding the sphere over her head (the sphere contains an amethyst); or people earrings, a stick figure man (always left ear) and woman (always right ear); or sun earrings, a dime-sized beneficent sun with rays enclosed in a ring, dangling from a post strung with an amethyst, a jade, and a few silver beads. When I was trapped in glasses, I wore either of two pairs of amethyst studs. I don't wear earrings with glasses on the principle that it's too much on my head, but I also don't like empty holes. I have a pair of amethysts set in beaded silver, very small, that DMB bought me in Provincetown, and a larger pair (that get in the way of a phone) of dark amethysts that I bought from CLH's jeweler friends in Aspen. Back to bathroom to brush my teeth and braid my hair. Brushing my teeth leaves me parched, which is why I drink hot water from the shower nozzle after brushing my teeth in the shower and gulp a brushing pint before braiding. Then I assemble my knapsack, removing yesterday's empty yogurt cup and adding today's from the bar along with two bananas ripped off the bunch in the fruit bowl, and going back into the bedroom to retrieve my book. I check to make sure I have charged batteries and the next tape of my audio book. At 6:58, prompted by the top-of-the-hour commercial break, I scamper to kiss RDC goodbye, rip a coat from the hall closet, bang the television off, shove my feet into hated shoes, and seize up my pack while draining my last pint so I don't desiccate on the bus, and open the door. In the entry way I reach back for my perfume (Prescriptives' Calyx) which lives in the cd cases by the door, anoint myself there where the spores of perfume won't aggravate RDC's asthma, grab my sunglasses, smile at the thought of the prescription sunglasses unworn, unnecessary, on the bureau, and scurry off for the bus. I cut through the complex from our side (Something Way, which in Denver means a diagonal street) to Something Street, which is north-south. Usually the bus turns northbound onto Something Street from South Street while I walk to the intersection of Something and North Streets. Sometimes it's already trundling northward and I have to scurry to my stop. Sometimes it's progressed as far as the stop before the intersection and I have to skedaddle southward to that stop, either to reach it in time or to rely on the mercy of the driver to pull to the side and make an unscheduled stop just for me. They always do, even when it's not the regular driver to know I'm a regular passenger. After the stop before mine, the bus has to get into the left lane to make the left turn at the intersection. In the half dozen times over two years I've needed the bus to make the unscheduled lisa stop, the bus has still been in the right lane except once when the driver had begun to swerve leftward and, seeing me, swung rightward again, kind soul. Any time I have to run for the bus, the whole ride is a torment of thirst, because I never remember a water bottle. At my regular stop, waiting for the bus, I watch the sunrise or the light on the mountains in the west, or birds in the park. There are almost always crows or magpies or even geese or wretched pigeons or confused seagulls. I never see a gull in Denver without wondering why, with wings and no mortgage, it chooses to live here instead of on the coast, so I call them confused. Or I'll watch someone walking a dog or eye the folk taking their morning constitutionals. None of them bring water on their walks. A westward bus tries to coincide with my downtownward bus. Usually its passengers can make the connection to mine, sometimes not. Its schedule changed a few months ago to arrive a minute or two earlier, facilitating the transferring people's connection. Some of the people at the stop await my commuter bus and some the now-earlier westward bus, including one of the local characters I call Spitting Guy. I call him Spitting Guy because he is unable to swallow his own spit. He spits before he gets on the bus and his face gets all contorted while he's on it and he spits as soon as he gets off. I can't imagine how thirsty that would make me. Spitting Guy hasn't grasped that he has to be ready a few minutes earlier in the morning, so many's the time he stands forlorn on the east side of Something Street, watching his bus pull away westward. He won't cross against the light, either, even if there are no cars in either direction, so often he has missed the bus when any normal person would have jaywalked. And the light at that intersection is one of the longest in the civilized world, too. So if he gets to the intersection and sees his bus approaching but still won't cross against the light, then he seems even more pathetic. It really is a long light, too. Often in our car, whoever is in the passenger seat (usually me) will nip out to ring the pedestrian signal, just to hasten the process. When I cross Something Way, I ring on my complex's side and again on the north side, just as a public service to the folks waiting in their cars (hoping one day a pedestrian will have such mercy on me). On the bus I sit in the front, so I can see out; having a clear forward view can prevent a motion-induced headache--maybe I'm dehydrated. Among the regulars at my stop are Purse-mouth, whose mouth is drawn into a disapproving moue but has a nice smile when she does smile; and 70s-girl, who seems not to have learned that feathered hair and blue eyeshadow are out out out and who smokes and reads, when she rarely does read, V.C. Andrews (still) or crafts books (I am always glad to see people younger than 60 knit or embroider); and an Indian man who always smiles even as he rolls his eyes against the alien cold. I sit near Linda, in the left jump seat, who is the only passenger besides me to read titles I don't recognize, or Fat Chick, who is clinically obese and sits in the right, single jump seat since she can't share a regular double seat. When Smoking Man sits in the front left side, I sit elsewhere. Besides reeking of his tobacco pall, his skin is yellow with nicotine, his hair is greasy with nicotine (have you ever noticed the texture of a heavy smoker's hair?), he is in his 60s (or younger, but smoking has aged him), and he tried to talk me up once. A few times I ran for the bus with my hair loose, and once on the bus, there braided and pinned it. I realize that's rude, and it happened only a few times. After such an occasion, he sat next to me on the afternoon bus, when it's empty enough that everyone can have their own seat, and talked to me about my hair. He said avidly, "You have this wonderful process of doing your hair." I realized he had a Hair Thing and had been watching me run my hands through the cascade of hair, draw it into a braid, pin it over my neck…. I enjoy thinking of my hair as Katie (Rommely) Nolan described it in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: "A woman's hair is her mystery. Daytimes, it's pinned up. But at night, alone with her man, the pins come out and it hangs loose like a shining cape." I know it was my own fault for going out with it loose and rudely fussing with it on the bus, but considering how repellent he is, his attention was an insult. So I avoid him more assiduously than I would if his stench were his only drawback. I set my knapsack between my feet to keep it off the floor. I take off my coat and lay it on my lap. Why do people heat their cars and buses and look at you askance when you take off your coat therein? Don't they get hot--and thirsty--wearing coats in heated places? I pull out my Walkman and plug in. I've just gone back to recorded books for the winter and enjoy listening more than reading on the bus because I do other stuff. I can watch the sunset slip over the land, not from east to west as elsewhere but from west to east as the mountain tops then foothills catch fire and the westward light eventually meets the sunlight flowing east down the slopes; I can write out Christmas cards; I can write in my journal. In the station, I stow my gear maybe later than other passengers but I do it fast and get up and into line without slowing anyone in a seat behind me. The masses file singly through the right door until I reach the left one and open it, whereupon the one line becomes two. Is this so novel? I stride through the station and out the door, decline the day's flyers, notice the crowd decrease as most passengers board shuttles to take them further into downtown. Around the corner to my building, where I gauge my wakefulness for the last time: ride the escalator, climb the escalator, or climb the stairs? Which is faster, will get me to water faster? Into my building, closing my eyes against the bizarre Christmas display with animatronic animules and too-loud Christmas music, too alien to my taste for me to call "Christmas carols." Wait by the bank of elevators. Smile at the other building regulars, gently inform a newbie that the dedicated elevators go to only particular floors, which is why the button for his chosen floor wouldn't light. Test that I am awakely alert by whether I turn in the correct direction when I get to my floor, which I only do if I can remember if the elevator I boarded was on the left or right side of the lobby. Check for faxes at the front desk while greeting the receptionist. Yawn while stumping down the hall--I should drink some water to raise my blood pressue. Pluck the yogurt from my knapsack, sling knapsack into corner of cube, turn on computer, grab water jug. In lunchroom, deposit yogurt into fridge and read whatever magazine anyone left on the table while filling jug with a half gallon of slowly filtered water. At desk again, fill "Welcome to the Library" freebie cup (acquired at the dedication of the children's room, the last section of the new library to open in 1995), sip water in order to speak new voice message then change message so while logging onto server and launching basic programs. Sit. It is 7:35. I have been up just over an hour and a half. I have drunk three quarts of water. Before noon I will have drunk another two quarts, and before I leave at 3:45, yet another two, and in the evening two more. I love water. But I still need to bring a bottle for the bus. |
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Last modified 10 December 1998
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Copyright © 1998 LJH
When the
alarm blares at 6:00, I flail from the bed, usually already facing right.
Sometimes left though, and so I try to to clamber over RDC to the other
wall, presumably to maneuver around the foot of the bed (impeded by the
ever-present pile of clothes not put away) to the clock. About halfway
over RDC (now whining), though, I wake up enough get out the right side
of the bed, take a step, and turn off the alarm. I pop a pill from the
case into my cupped palm and toss it at my tonsils as I turn back for
the pint glass on my bedtable. I don't need the water to swallow the pill,
oh no. I overcame my gag reflex back when I discovered it interfered with
a skill I was trying to master (I think it was pretty low to begin with,
though: I could never make myself throw up either) and now can swallow
whole grapes, if I want to.