The Mast-Head: Wake-Up Call
The wind woke me up early Wednesday, which was a good thing. I had gone to sleep the night before setting the alarm on my phone in order to get up and get some work done before the house stirred, but things being what they are, it had run out of battery life sometime during the night.
It is astonishing, really, that we (I) have become so dependent on devices sold by Apple or Samsung or whatever, and so assured of their constant presence, that we (I) have, for example, put away our traditional alarm clocks. Their ubiquity and utility means we no longer have to plan who’s picking up the kids — “I’ll just text you!” — or even take a good old-fashioned book to bed at night. Yet when I really needed to get moving in order to attend to a few things, like write this column, the most analog of wake-up calls, a shifting, hard gust of wind, came to the rescue.
The northwest wind is cold down here near the beach at Gardiner’s Bay, and the tiled kitchen, which faces the bay in this aging house, is chilly at 5:45 a.m. Still, because I needed to get things done, the temperature had its advantages.
Normally the dawn routine is dictated to me by Leo, the house-pig. After eating, he insists on attention, begging for ear-scratching by rooting at my ankles or, if that fails, rotating the claw-foot table at which I am trying to work. Pigs are strong, even relatively small ones. Leo is not much bigger than an average Labrador retriever, albeit with stubbier legs, yet with a flick of his snout, the oak table scoots across the floor. Not on Wednesday, however. The drafty air quickly convinced him to climb back into his covered bed and settle down, invisible except for a lump at one side.
That he has a bed at all is a bit of a relief; he and the dogs had destroyed it around Thanksgiving, and none of the quick alternatives seemed to do. A replacement was back-ordered where Lisa had bought the original, and the combination of old pillows and threadbare beach towels were a poor substitute.
Of course, just about as soon as Leo settled down on Wednesday, the dogs started squabbling over a toy. Then our soon-to-be-6-year-old son woke up. And then the day really began.