The Sun Rises

Fall term of my second year at my MFA program, I was assigned to teach two sections of Introduction to Fiction. It was a great opportunity to break out of the mold of teaching first-year comp, select my own texts, and refine my thinking about both the crafting of literature and the pedagogy surrounding it.

The two sections I was assigned to teach were Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.

I had my teacherly concerns related students who might sleep through alarms and not come to class, or, little better, make it to the classroom, but show up tired, sluggish, and disengaged.

I had my personal concerns, all the more marked. I’ve never been a morning person, and throughout my own undergrad and first round of grad school, had never had a class earlier than 9:20 a.m. Even my office jobs generally hadn’t called on me to arrive earlier than 8:30 a.m., and there was an unspoken understanding that 8:30 to 9 in the morning was more or less a grace period. I’d get up between 7 and 7:30, eat breakfast, shower, and drive into work within the acceptable parameters of office culture.

But this teaching gig would have me in front of a classroom and lecturing at 8. When I checked the Corvallis bus schedule, I discovered that the earliest stop at the bus outside my apartment complex rolled in after 7:30, arriving at campus between 7:40 and 7:45 if the bus were on time. The Corvallis bus system wasn’t bad—I’d learned to trust it within a ten-to-fifteen minute span, but if the bus did arrive fifteen minutes late at that morning hour, then I wouldn’t get from my campus stop to the classroom on time; and if it were running late, I wouldn’t have time enough to make the two-and-a-half-mile walk to campus by 8:00.

I did the math and strategized. I arrived at the conclusion that I would need to walk to campus. And that in order to have breakfast and shower and not be in a rush every step of the way, I really needed to be out of bed by 6 a.m.

6 a.m. The wake up hearkened back to high school, when I needed to be at the bus stop by 7:15, and thus got up around 6:30. Only 6 was even earlier. I had had individual days of work, school, and travel, when I needed to be up at all sorts of hours, but never for more than a couple days at a stretch. I had had on-call situations that saw phone calls coming my way at all hours of the night and morning. But they were always temporary, always under two months.

I’m not writing all of this to make you feel sympathy for me--there are plenty of people who have had to get up this early--or earlier--for longer periods of their lives. People with children to tend to. People for who found the wee hours the only time they could scrape together to work out or write or pursue other passions. People who had harder work to do than teaching college students a subject that they loved.

I’m offering this background, instead, to drive home how I felt at the news of this early morning teaching assignment and the thought process I went through as it became a reality.

In those early weeks (truth be told, most of the term) I was always running late. Never late to arrive in the classroom, but often scrambling through the last stages of getting ready at home, or not so much walking as jogging for portions of the journey to school. But then there came a morning when I got up with my alarm, didn’t dawdle over my breakfast reading, and got out the door on time and in line with the schedule I had set for myself and so rarely quite lived up to.

I walked down Witham Hill. To the east, the sky was streaked in pink and orange. The clouds had taken on blue undertones as the sky just started lighten.

I’ve always liked sunsets. I like the colors. I like the metaphorical idea of something beautiful at the end of the day, just as night begins to set in. I like their accessibility—that I’ve gotten to see sunsets on drives and walks home at the end of the day, or after dinner, before I’m supposed to meet up with friends or before a show I want to watch comes on TV. Even so, I noticed as I grew older that I was watching fewer sunsets. Too tied up with my job and with work I had imposed on myself. Half the time, I didn’t even notice the sun had gone down until I looked out a window, or were otherwise roused from whatever distractions life threw my way. When I started dating Heather and after our first date included watching the sunset over a San Diego beach, I made a conscious vow to myself to pay more attention. Not to let myself miss this point in the day.

I got better about it. But still not great.

But there I was, a forty-minute-ish walk I had no way around. A class to teach. Sometimes I listened to podcasts along the way. Some times music.

That day, it was music.

REM, to be precise, “Me In Honey” to put an even finer point on it. I listened to that swell of chords and that wordless moan of guest vocalist Kate Pierson. And I watched the sunrise.

I still ran late on others, and sometimes I went so fast that I was only implicitly aware of the sky growing lighter without consciously recognizing the sunrise.

But those mornings when I did see it were better. Sweeter. Those mornings, more than any of the others, I recognized that a new day really had begun.