Craig Klein's "The Early Bird Club"

Cock-a-doodle-do, and good morning to you! Welcome to the early bird club. I’m your host, Craig Klein, inviting to join me for the next few paragraphs as I explore and explain some of the joys and drawbacks of being an early riser.

I’ve always gotten up early, as far back as I can recall. When I was a child growing up in rural eastern Kansas, my daily chore was to go to the hen house and fetch the eggs for breakfast. This was always well before dawn. As a child, I reasoned that folks somehow thought that the chickens would be more forgiving of the early hand, one that reached under their nesting bodies before they could muster enough consciousness to peck bare knuckles with the force and rapidity of a jackhammer on concrete. Needless to say, I needed to be especially vigilant as the egg taker, ever wary of the dreaded beak. In other words, I arose both early and alertly.

From that point forward, I would always be up with the sun, down with the moon. To this day, I’m fully awake and rarin’ to go at 5:30 AM. Each day. Every day. The world is such a special place in the wee hours as the sun prepares to make its daily debut.! Birds sing, deer forage, dampness and dew hang on everything outdoors. It’s a delightfully quiet time. You know how sound carries long distances at night because the usual background din of human activity isn’t there...the distant siren or train whistle that seems to float on the ether? Now, imagine that with everything fully lighted. To me, this is how day life must have felt before the coming of overpopulation and the industrial age. Perhaps this is why some still choose to live in isolation. I don’t really know. What I DO understand is that one can be contemplative in a way like no other in and around the dawn.

Of course, there are some practical benefits of getting going early. No traffic whatsoever, easy parking, no waiting lines anywhere. Yes, the morning world is one of ease, and low stress, too. The people you do meet all seem to share something deeper, something visceral, something unspoken. I know what it is. We are drawn to dawn, each and every one of us. We know it. We sense it. Our conversations always seem to center on that which I’ve already described. A new bird someone saw or roses in bloom are equally as exciting to the early riser as any political contest. After all, both are world events, in a manner of speaking.

You must be wondering if there’s a downside, and the answer is yes. Early risers do grow weary in mid-afternoon, frequently needing a cat nap at that time of the day. It’s our concession to the late-rising majority of our species...that which allows us to keep going until 5 PM or later just so we can meaningfully interact with the rest of our kind. As for going out late to dinner or parties, in general we can forget it! I almost never go to an event that starts after 8 PM. The reason is simple. Bedtime’s at 9. My 8 hours of rest always begins by then. I can’t help it; I’m preprogrammed for the long haul.

I’d like to continue, but it’s now 8 AM and the rest of you are waking up and my phone is ringing. There goes my window of composing opportunity for today. But another one will come tomorrow, and each and every day thereafter. By the time most of you reading this open your eyes, I will have already finished writing this piece. You see, the birds are singing. It’s my song!