When You're Alive to It, Every Day Is a New Morning

The Boston Herald

I wake up early to write because there are no distractions at 5 a.m. No telephones ringing, no radio from another room, no one making demands.

There's just the dark, the silence and me.

Throughout December, night lingers, day breaking late, school buses already on the road, traffic a steady whoosh by the time it's light enough to see outdoors. December mornings dawn slowly, the night reluctant to leave.

Not so these late winter mornings.

On Thursday, the day was up early, seeping into the sky well before 6. The outside world was still navy, but faded like a favorite shirt, the outlines of trees and a telephone pole and my neighbor Al's house suddenly visible when just a week ago at this time, they were not.

On Thursday, morning didn't open one eye and quickly close it, then pull up the covers and go back to sleep. It opened both eyes, leapt up and said, "Watch."

So I did. From my office window I watched as the sky brightened to the color of fresh ink on white paper, then faded to a softer, thinner blue.

And it was amazing because it happened so quickly, because it was as if some invisible someone above the clouds, or beyond the horizon, a Picasso with a palate of colors, kept dabbing white and yellow and red on this magnificent canvas, painting it as you watched.

By 6:30, the canvas was pale blue between the trees and above Al's house, and pale pink beside it, a thin layer of rose-colored clouds seeming to rise like steam from the ground. By 7 the pink was gone and the entire sky was the color of Windex, so bright it looked scrubbed, so unclouded that the trees were already casting shadows on Al's white garage doors.

Amazing. All this before a second cup of coffee.

"We look too much to museums," Ralph Ellison wrote. "The sun coming up in the morning is enough."

Why, I wondered, was this day so stunning? Because it dawned after weeks of clouds and rain, after months of lackluster days? Was it dazzling because it contrasted with all the television footage of tornadoes and floods? Did it stand out because it was a standout, or because after months of winter and darkness, this morning felt like a prelude to spring?

The next morning, the sky was as bright and the air as clear, but Friday didn't dazzle. I don't know why. There were the same deep shadows on Al's garage doors. There was the same fret of trees in the background, the same expanse of blue sky. If I had taken a picture of the two days, they would have looked the same.

But they weren't - not for me.

Maybe that's because beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder. Or maybe, what's even truer, is that the eyes have to be ready and willing to see beauty.

On Thursday, for some reason, they were. I looked out instead of within and what was outside held me in its grip all day.

Walking the dog, I noticed patches of green on brown ground and thick buds on a magnolia tree, and slogging through mud, I smelled spring and heard birds that weren't crows and felt - I didn't just think about -  Robert Browning's words, "God's in His heaven. All's right with the world!"

Driving down Route 128 in Waltham, I looked across at the reservoir and it was luminous, all silver and stark, hundreds of bare trees surrounding it.

Later, at night, getting out of the car, I looked up and saw that the stars were like rhinestones on velvet, the air was that clear.

There have been other evenings just as clear and other mornings when the sky was as blue. I know this. I know Thursday was nothing special. It was just another day.

"The world will never starve for lack of wonders.  But for lack of wonder," Gilbert Keith Chesterton said.

Maybe Thursday was special solely because I noticed it, because I paid attention, and I usually don't.