The Crack of Dawn

"It's five o'clock this morning and the sun is on the rise," to borrow a line from John Denver. I really hadn't intended to be up this early when I shut off the light last night, so this is more accident than design. I was dreaming about the correct drug treatment for diseases like "fish finger" when consciousness rescued me from reliving my professor's Robin Williams imitation for the umpteenth time.

Speaking of morning, I love the old television commercial that depicts a young guy coming home for Christmas, quietly opening the front door, his arms laiden with wrapped packages. There's snow on the ground, it's probably 40 below and he's clad only in a sweater and muffler. Excuse me for a minute, this is a description of a coffee commercial and mine has just finished brewing -- be right back. Ok, where were we? Oh yeah, so it's cold but he's warm because he's got Christmas gifts and a muffler. Works for me.

As he quietly shuts the door behind him, we see his adoring little sister standing at the top of the stairs and calling, "Peter, Peter!" He sweeps her up in his arms and suggests they wake everyone else up. The next scene? You guessed it, Peter and his sister are brewing Folger's coffee! I'm being facetious; it really is an endearing storyline and proves once again that Norman Rockwell sells.

Thinking about Rockwell (aren't you glad you couldn't sleep either so you could be up reading my rambling?), as a kid I discovered his work in a volume of American artists and became really fascinated with his images. Partly it was their realism and partly it was the way I felt looking at them. It was like peering through a window at another world, watching its inhabitants jump in the old swimming hole, have Thanksgiving dinner, and sometimes go to war, yet they could not see me.

I love windows. Old single-paned windows like the ones that open out from the hayloft of my barn, large picture windows, small bathroom windows -- any kind of window. Walls without windows make me want to get out the saw and go to work. There's a whole world outside and it's not enough to know it's there, it needs to be seen and brought home. Windows are optimistic, they show us possibilities. All we need to do is go after them.