Getting Up Early

 

    I was never a fan of getting up early and because this is the first day of Daylight Savings Time, I thought that might be a relevant subject for the blog.  

    I know that getting up early is especially difficult during the teen years and that is when I first noticed how torturous it was.  Early risings even effected my grades when I started high school.  On my Freshman year my high school was so over-crowded that they had to set up two shifts, an early one with classes starting at 7:00 and the regular schedule that began at 8:00.

    Unfortunately, I was one of those bleary-eyed students on the early shift.  My father, who I always thought was crazy for getting up so early, had no trouble getting me up and driving me to school for my 7:00 class, but when I got to school, I was certainly not awake enough to do any kind of scholarly work, and what made matters worse was that my first class was Latin.

    I would have had trouble with Latin anyway because I had never been taught the in-depth grammar that Latin required.  I remember my hard-nosed Latin teacher suddenly talking about the Latin rules concerning “predicate nominatives”.   A predicate nominative was something I had never heard of during my elementary school education.

    The lack of grammar background required for Latin, coupled with a brain that was struggling to stay awake, resulted a big red “F” in Latin on my report card.   It is the only “F” I had ever received during my education, and it was not really the way one wants to start their first year in high school. 

    That first year of early rising in high school, forever painted having to get up early, as a negative.  As I grew older, while I never really enjoyed getting up early, I came to accept the practice as a fact of life.  Aging further, I got more and more used to it.

    Now in my dotage, it seems like it would be quite enjoyable to lay in bed in the mornings until I got so bored that I had to get up, but with old age, my circadian rhythm has been firmly set to get up early.  I don’t think I could “sleep-in” if I was allowed to, but I couldn’t anyway, because our dog Kona has a circadian rhythm that is set to an even earlier schedule than mine, and she always wakes me up a half hour before my circadian rhythm wake-up time.

    Thus is life.

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