I Sleep to Wake

Our puppy Dosey got me up at 6:30 yesterday morning and took me for a walk at 7 (a.m.!) I’ve never been a morning person, and this was the first time since brain surgery I’d seen the early side of the morning. It was lovely.

The sun had that soft morning glow, slanting over the horizon. The world smelled like dew. More bicyclists than cars went down the road. We walked for an hour but only passed three homes. This neighborhood wakes to sleep and takes its waking slow, like the poet Theodore Roethke and I do . 

I haven’t seen such a morning—or any morning—in such a long time. In the years before my first brain tumor, I set my alarm for 4 a.m. so I could be at the gym by 5:30, swim or lift weights, do a rushed yoga (not really the idea of yoga), and take a shower before heading to the high school where the first class I taught began at 7:25. I had to be there by 7 a.m. I drove fast. I never noticed the morning glow.

I sometimes experienced the morning after an all-nighter in college. I would write all night in Chambers, Davidson's central building, at a large table across from some guy with a day’s stubble drinking a giant Mountain Dew (I never needed any stimulant beyond my home-brewed anxiety). I generally finished my writing by dawn and walked across the small and lovely  campus as the morning’s pinks turned golden and birds sang from the trees, invisible to me but sweet in their serenades.

Except for these quiet mornings, from birth to brain tumors I was always busy, always moving fast. I remember saying there would be plenty of time for sleep after I died. In high school, one of they first poems I wrote in Ms. Smisson’s Creative Writing class was, “Too much to do and too little time: the complaint of a day, a year, a life.” 

As a teacher, I was always running around campus with papers to grade and class materials to Xerox. Sometimes, especially in the months before my first tumor was diagnosed, I would fall, snatching the papers, falling like leaves in the rain, and running on. 

In this post-brain tumor life, I have slowed down. Though my losses from these tumors have been hard, this slowing down has been one of the gifts. On yesterday's walk, Dosey and I would move forward a few steps as she sniffed the ground. Sometimes, a neighbor stopped to adore her (never me, mind you), and they’d continue quickly down the sidewalk. 

Dosey would sit in the sun, watching them go, checking out a big dog across the street or a bicyclist moving by, or wiggling her nose in the passing breeze. She would sit and I would stand with her for ten minutes at a stop before moving a few yards on. 

Never before my brain tumors would I have moved so slowly, not only because I was too busy but also because such slowing down is a different way of living altogether. Before these tumors, in some ways I would always wake to sleep. I still wake to sleep (After yesterday's walk, Ann took Dosey to the dog park, and I took a nap), but I also sleep to wake.

 It’s lovely waking to sleep and taking my waking slow. It’s also lovely to sleep to wake, still taking my waking slow. Slow:that's the key.