September 25, 2013

• Waking Up With Shakespeare

  

  Shakespeare was a morning person. I don’t know why that thought popped into my head the other morning; I was mostly incapable of coherent thought at the time, but that thought sneaked past the general panicky confusion of suddenly awakening to loud music in my ear and blinding light in my eyes.

  In case you were wondering, I am not a morning person. By the time I wake up, the sun is usually well past the point on the horizon where it takes direct aim at my bedroom window, and besides, I usually have the blackout blinds pulled all the way down. For some reason, the blind over the window next to my bed was raised a few inches that morning and when I reluctantly opened my eyes, they were seared by the rising sun slanting through the window directly into my eyeballs. I groaned, screwed my eyes shut and Shakespeare popped into my fuzzy brain saying,

  “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
  It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
  Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
  Who is already sick and pale with grief,
  That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.”

  Now, before you think I’m some sophisticated, artsy-fartsy type who quotes Shakespeare in my sleep (which most of you really should know better by now), I will admit up front that I’m not quoting Romeo from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, but Gwyneth Paltrow, a.k.a. Viola de Lesseps, a.k.a. Romeo from the movie Shakespeare in Love.

  I had been awakened a few seconds earlier by a cacophony of sound blasting in my ear and had reacted in the rare-for-me reflex of slapping the Snooze button on my alarm clock. Something was horribly wrong. I had my alarm set to softly play the gentle opening guitar strains of Stairway to Heaven and gradually build to the louder climactic guitar solo. Why was it blaring the loud part so... loudly? I groaned and closed my sun-blinded eyes, waiting for the spots to go away. I was just going to rest them for a moment, but suddenly the guitar was screaming in my ear again and I opened my eyes to blinding sunlight again and seared my eyeballs again, so I hit the Snooze button again and Shakespeare popped into my groggy brain again.

  “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
  It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
  That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
  Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
  Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.”

  “It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
  No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
  Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
  Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops…”

  Well, I wouldn’t refer to Led Zeppelin as either a nightingale or a lark, and once I stopped snorting at that thought - and the phrase "jocund day" - I realized what had gone wrong. I’d used the alarm the previous morning and had forgotten to reset it to the beginning of the song. The temperature had dropped in the past 24 hours; I had my alarm volume set to compete with the noise of an air conditioner and three fans, all of which were now turned off.

  I squinted my eyes open, reached over and turned off the alarm clock before it could blast my eardrums apart for the third time. A cold draft blew across my arm and I pulled it back under the covers wondering why I was about to come out from under my warm comforter in order to go jump into a cold swimming pool. It would be so much easier to smother all thoughts of Shakespeare with my pillow and snuggle down for another hour of sleep.

  “I must be gone and live, or stay and die.”

  Okay, so it’s not quite that serious, but I must keep jumping into that cold pool a couple of times a week if I want to keep my knees working. If I start down the road of only going when I feel like it, I’d almost never go. So I did the heroic thing and dragged myself out of bed, into the cold, blindingly bright morning, and to the pool. I just hope when I make the heroic choice it will end better for me than it does for most of Shakespeare’s heroes. My life is more of a comedy than a tragedy, so I figure there's a fair chance it will end well.

  • 6:53 pm
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