A little precise, you may think, but I’m only so aware of the time due to it being the same time I always wake for work, even on this, the first day back following the Christmas break.
I can’t remember when this became a kind of meridian for my days, but at some point it became the moment at which I chose to begin my mornings, a specific time before the house wakes but still a time to keep silence lest I should wake the rest of my family.
The cats will keep me company though. They, being creatures of habit just like me, yawn, stretch and rub against my shins as I stir the day’s first coffee.
Up, down
Up, down
Up, down
Up, down
The piston-rolls of their shoulders carry them to the back door behind me where they stop for a moment, incline their heads a little, close their eyes and sniff at the air, ‘reading’ the dawn in a way that reminds me that, despite their domesticated ease and pet-soft foibles, there are some things deep down inside them that are far beyond my understanding, and always will be.
We take our silence and my coffee out into the chilly air of the dark garden where the cats, one grey and one predominantly black, merge into the shadows like dispersing smoke while I listen to the quiet, punctuated by the early chirps and chirrups of the dawn chorus which is already underway despite the early date, the even earlier hour and the damp weather. On it squeaks, like the rusty hinges of the morning, suggesting that all I need do is put my shoulder to the day’s great dark door and heave…
As I sip the coffee I consider the irony in the fact that I spent much of my teenage years and twenties trying to be as unlike my father as possible and yet now, as I slide into my forties, I find myself involuntarily falling into the same habits, drinking the same drink in the same early-start manner. I think of him now, as it is definitely a morning for fathers.
In the same vein I think too of Those Winter Sundays, a poem by the American writer Robert Hayden, which I taught to some of my classes a few years back, and of which I’m very fond. In it, he talks of his own father waking before the rest of the household, and who, with “crooked hands that ached”, polished shoes and lit fires before waking everyone else. Thoughts of such activities led me back to the fathers in my own family – my father’s father traipsing out to building sites long before even this early hour, even on weekends; my own father, getting up on his week off from his shifts at the steelworks to walk my miles-long paper route every day while I lay in bed sick and feverish, then wordlessly plopping the brown paper envelope containing ‘my’ wages onto my bed at the end of the week.
Nothing quote so harsh for me now though, and certainly nothing so dramatic as the “austere and lonely offices” of Hayden’s father. Still, there are lunch boxes to make, a uniform to iron and breakfast to begin before I rouse anyone else.
Before all that I’ll take a little more time, a father’s prerogative, perhaps, to finish my coffee while for the time being, the birds sing on and the rooftops, covered in a white blanket of frost, remain tucked in.
