Pre-Dawn and other Laments

Winston decides it’s morning at 4:22 AM. Not 4:15. Not 4:30. 4:22, every single day, with the precision of a Swiss watch wrapped in fur and entitlement. He accomplishes this by sitting on my chest and staring at my face from a distance of approximately three inches, which is apparently cat for “your services are required.”

I lie there doing that thing where you pretend you’re still asleep, like maybe if I don’t acknowledge him he’ll reconsider his life choices. He will not reconsider his life choices. Winston has never reconsidered anything in his entire life. He places one paw on my cheek. Not aggressively. Just a gentle reminder that he exists and I am failing him.

The room is freezing because my wife of forty-two years has decided that hot flashes are a team sport. The thermostat lives at sixty-two degrees now, and somewhere around year thirty-seven of our marriage I lost the authority to have opinions about this.

I lie there for another thirty seconds doing that thing where you take inventory of your body like you’re running diagnostics on a vintage car that might not start. Left knee: present and complaining. Lower back: staging a minor insurrection. Bladder: extremely vocal about its needs. This is sixty-three. This is what we’ve come to.

The dogs are already awake, of course, because dogs don’t experience existential dread about leaving a warm bed. They’re sitting there in the darkness, tails thumping against the floor with that idiotic optimism that only golden retrievers can maintain when it’s nineteen degrees outside and the sun won’t even think about showing up for another forty minutes.

I swing my legs out from under the covers and the cold hits me like I’ve been slapped by winter itself. The floor is ice. The air is ice. My bones are apparently also ice, or at least they feel that way as I stand and shuffle toward the closet, moving like someone who’s just learned to walk and isn’t particularly good at it yet.

Winston immediately takes my spot on the bed, curling into the warm depression where my body used to be, already asleep again like some kind of furry con artist.

The dogs are doing their pre-walk dance now, that full-body shimmy of anticipation that seems designed specifically to make me feel guilty about every second I’m not actively putting on my coat. I layer up. Thermal underwear. Sweatpants over the thermal underwear. A fleece that I’ve owned since the Clinton administration. A parka that could probably survive Antarctic exploration. Gloves. A knit hat that makes me look like I’m about to rob a convenience store very slowly.

Before we leave, I grab a Diet Sundrop from the fridge because apparently I’m the only person left in America who drinks Diet Sundrop, and I’m fine with that. The can is ice cold, which seems redundant given that everything else in my life is also ice cold, but the citrus-caffeine combination is non-negotiable. Coffee is for people who have their lives together. I’m drinking fluorescent soda in the dark at 4:35 AM.

We step outside.

Tennessee winter doesn’t ease you into anything. It just punches you directly in the face with cold. The dogs don’t notice. They never notice. They explode down the driveway like they’ve been waiting their entire lives for this specific moment, tails helicoptering, noses immediately pressed to the frozen ground.

I follow them down the street, sipping Diet Sundrop that’s so cold it makes my teeth hurt, watching Captain and Morgan investigate the same mailboxes they investigated yesterday and will investigate again tomorrow. Above us, the stars are still out. The neighborhood is silent except for the sound of Sauconys on pavement and Captain sniffing a fire hydrant like it contains the secrets of the universe.

My face goes numb. My fingers go numb despite the gloves. I can feel my nostril hairs freezing, which is a sensation I didn’t know existed until my sixties and could have lived without knowing.

And yet.

There’s something about this that I can’t quite articulate to my younger self, the one who slept until noon and thought fifty was ancient. Something about being awake before the world, about these two ridiculous dogs and their infinite capacity for joy over absolutely nothing, about the strange comfort of routine even when that routine involves mild hypothermia.

We walk for twenty-five minutes. The dogs pee on everything. I think about nothing and everything. I finish my Diet Sundrop. By the time we turn back, there’s just the faintest suggestion of light bleeding into the eastern sky.

The dogs collapse immediately upon reentering the house, sprawling on their beds like they’ve just completed the Iditarod. Winston is still asleep in my spot. My wife is buried under blankets in the arctic tundra of our bedroom.

I stand in the kitchen thawing, cracking open another Diet Sundrop.

This is sixty-three.

It’s absurd and uncomfortable and I’ll be back out here tomorrow at the same time.