Edward Hirsch

Early Sunday Morning
By EDWARD HIRSCH

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot
but now I'm one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations
but they go dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.

It's like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone's else's motorcycle
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I'm sitting in a dimly lit
cafe full of early morning risers
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter.

My theme for the day comes from a Edward Hopper painting called "Nighthawks". In the painting that was painted in 1942, people are drinking coffee at night or it could be in the early morning hours. It could have been someone thinking about a red-haired girl who left the coffee drinker 40 years before in a parking lot and roared away with someone on a motorcycle.

There is a sub-culture in the large cities that drink coffee in the 24 hour cafes or at least they used to. They certainly don't do it in the Starbucks of this world for no one can drink coffee and get free refills there. The cafe in the painting is one such place. I live in a town that does not have one of those places or if they do I am not aware of it. I don't live the kind of life I used to live back in my younger days. If I am not at home, I am at Starbucks or at the lake drinking my Starbucks coffee.

The sub-culture of those who drink the coffee in the cafes are men for the most part. I used to envy the easy way they could just walk into a place and order coffee and remain unmolested for hours, drinking their coffee and saying hello to the regulars. Women generally don't do that. If I go to a cafe, I end up writing in my journal because I never see another woman unless she is a waitress. I guess we have too much to do at home. I think men are at the cafes because they live alone at home or because they need some sort of break from who live with.

I see women meet for lunch and it is rare to see men to the same. It is a business lunch if they do. Men just have coffee to hang out. They hang out in bars although they don't do that all that much anymore or at least that is what I have been told. People are afraid of getting DUI's now. It's like having a club that one reads about in Sherlock Holmes stories. You go to the club for a smoke and a drink while you read the paper or talk with one's fellow members unless you are a member of the Dionysus Club. They have the rule of not talking. Oh yes, and no women. Sigh...