(This is not a poem.)
Good morning to waking up in the dark and watching the world turn colors.
Good morning to my body. It has at times been lean and muscular, and other times, like now, it’s a little soft and squidgy around the edges. I observe it without judgment. I’m thankful for what it’s done for me. I’ll whip it back into shape at some point, but not today.
Good morning to the voices of my children who shoot out of bed like canon fire and require no time to warm up. They wake up warm. They are ready to play and laugh and scream and twirl right when they set foot on the floor. When did we un-learn that?
Good morning to this particular tragedy-adjacent morning, a weird and melancholy day for all of us who remember where we were twenty years ago. I was in the hallway of my seventh grade classrooms and my best friend passed and told me what had happened. Wanting to appear detached (and having no idea what she was talking about), I shrugged and said, “Cool.” I knew immediately that was so irreverent that I’d regret it. All our teachers turned on the news and we stopped learning, or started learning, in another sense. In the fall of 2011 I’d be standing in front of a classroom of seventh graders, teaching them about this day because they didn’t remember it. They, who had so little, wrote letters to the families of the victims.
Good morning to the news cycle, where even an accidental glimpse of a screen and the push notifications from the New York Times can send me into a spiral of dread. I read these, of course, on my phone in a house, safe, with food and with air conditioning and heat and medicine. And even still I have thoughts like, “Reading about that cast a pall over my morning.” The world is on fire and I get to decide when I read about it.
Good morning to the cobbler in the refrigerator, staring at me each time I open it. Not today, Satan. (But tonight? Probably.)
Good morning to the new parenting rules that say emotions are normal and time-out isn’t what it used to be. We embrace the big feelings and try not to say things like, “That makes Mom feel sad,” because our feelings aren’t their little problem. That part I think we’re getting right, but I know we’re getting it wrong somewhere else the next generation will correct.
Good morning to the fall TV lineup and how this should be Ellen Pompeo’s last season acting on Grey’s. Right? Come on. It’s done. She is a queen and an icon and should get paid forever, but what stories are left to tell?? We’ve done it all! Bomb/flood/fire/plane crash/active shooter/cancer scare/adoption/car crash/bus crash/PTSD night-chokings/spousal abuse/IZZIE IS ACTUALLY STILL ALIVE!/mental illness/addiction/race/immigration/COVID. The mind spins. I hope they don’t screw up the end of This Is Us.
Good morning, also, to Nicole Kidman’s truly unhinged accent work in Nine Perfect Strangers. It’s a journey and a delight.
Good morning to those of us who are feeling very weird about church right now. I believe in God. I want things to get better. If I could, I’d set my relationship status with organized religion to “It’s Complicated.” But to leave feels like an abandonment, so here I limbo.
Good morning to cool weather and a hearty THANK YOU to to the ways Covid restructured our sense of not postponing joy (a la “There are no rules anymore,”), allowing us to lean into our fall decor and drinks and treats on September 1st because who says we can’t? The police? Celebrate Christmas before Thanksgiving for all I care. Joy is the bottom line. It’s fall at my house, dammit.
Good morning to the ways the world makes us all ache, to the songs of birds outside who aren’t afraid to sing it right out loud because they never had anyone tell them they were “too much.” To the hard pieces that we feel compelled to turn away from so that we can just freakin’ survive, and to the knowledge that being bewildered about sad things doesn’t mean something’s wrong with us – it just means we’re still alive, feeling, responding, not-numb-yet try-ers. Good morning to our very stubborn hope cracking through the places we thought we boarded up to protect ourselves, to warm sleeping dogs (and cats, too, I guess, whatever), to needing a sweater, to You’ve Got Mail season, to the hundreds of layers of life we have to sift through in the span of one little tiny day. To another day of navigating the brutalities both gently and fiercely. To Bill Pullman in While You Were Sleeping. To golden light streaming onto the floor as I finish this sentence. To where the light makes me look.