pull up a chair

in summer, when the windows’ optimal posture is open, i hear the birds at daystart. they warble their throats in the dark, not unlike the way we humans stumble to the bathroom, shove a toothbrush into our mouths, and begin the day with eyes half closed, foaming at the mouth.

the birds, specifically the red-breasted robin, like to get a jump on things. they seem to have selected—by some mysterious and far-off committee, i suppose—a start time of 4:30 a.m., roughly. very roughly. for that’s the hour when the first of the avian staccato, the chirp-chirp-chirp of the dawn, finds its way into my ears.

i rustle and rouse. feet soon planted on the ground (never too firmly these days; i am becoming of the wobbly variety), i follow the pre-ordained path: swipe my reading glasses off the bedside table (should i ever need to see in the dark, i suppose, is why i keep them there), stumble into the bath (i’ve explained that above), throw on the same clothes i wore yesterday (i am a creature of catholic school uniforms, i cannot seem to shake the habit). and then comes the good part, the part i love best: i shuffle down the stairs, and into the morning awake and alone. coffee is brewed (we still brew here, not having arrived into the coffee-pod era).

and that’s when i crank up what amounts to the family business: i lift the lid on the laptop, await its whistle and whir, and then i get to work. i type for a living. you witness it here.

of late i have been typing as many hours as i can stuff into a day. lights are out, usually but not always, by midnight. and you know when the start is. i pause for the occasional nibble. and a dunk in the pool. otherwise it’s all words all the time. i am in the penultimate throes of editing what’s turning out to be Book No. 6. and any day now, if i push hard enough through the next mornings-till-nightfall, i will whoosh it all back to the faraway editor and return to the business of breathing and living.

but i’m not there yet. there seems always to be another sentence to bolster. to untangle the inevitable grammarian knot. being of the nose-to-the-grindstone ilk (my father so ordained me decades and decades ago, warning me that keeping my nose ever to the grindstone was going to get me but one simple thing: a sharp nose), i can never quite fix things enough. so i keep at it; to be finished is wholly elusive.

and all of that is more or less why this morning i’ve no grand epiphanies to bring here to the table. i’ve simply been sharpening the instrument of my breathing, the one with the two little holes.

which brings me to the question i heard put to david sedaris the other week: “why write, david,” the inquisitor asked. why, oh why, has he tapped out enough words to amount to 16 books, hundreds and hundreds of (hilarious) essays, etcetera etcetera?

“to get better” is how he answered. and that answer, those three simple words, hit me right above my rather sharp nose. hard. with a thwop.

what better reason for living, for writing, for anything.

if you are a writer, to write to get better is the smartest thing in the world. also the smartest if you are, say, a garbage collector who lives to collect garbage. or a surgeon. (though, ideally, we humans in need of surgery should consider submitting only to those who’ve more or less gotten pretty good at their craft—their surgeoning, that is.)

“to get better” is also a very fine answer to the question of living. i realized it’s rather a koan. think about it: why do we get out of bed in the morning, plant feet firmly or not on the ground, and get about the business of whatever is our day? well, a fairly good reason is to get better at it. to put a bit of mindfulness to what otherwise might have been dawdling. wasting our days.

if we intend to live through another day—or hope to anyway—why not see if we can live just a little bit better today than yesterday? we could maybe be kinder. we could maybe listen more intently. we could take up a notch so many of the simple propositions that make us a human.

i have asked myself close to a million times why i insist on awaking with the birds on friday mornings and tapping out these missives. david sedaris, who has been writing every day since 1977, gave me my answer. i do it to get better. because better is always out of reach. and reaching is a mighty fine posture for living. maybe that’s why God gave us shoulders: so we could extend the bones from that socket and stretch our arms as far as they could—you got it—reach!

so as i slink away here, back to the tasks already piled onto the keyboard, i leave you with two simple queries (no need to answer aloud, these questions are meant simply to extend the conversation, to give you something maybe to ponder in the quiet and wonder of your very own beautiful mind):

what do you reach for each day? and where in your life do you try to get better?

sometimes when i get up early, i find i am not alone. say, yesterday, when i blearily looked out the back window and saw what seemed a mirage coiled under the trees in my garden. this sweet soul, who had apparently polished off a fine morning meal of every pansy in every pot in sight, reposed without making a sound. when i went out to visit her she paid me no mind. i might have been able to feed her from the palm of my hand. but then i thought, TICK!, and recoiled my hand. after making her promise not to partake of my so-called farmer plot (all herbs and zinnias this year), i bid her adieu and off she wandered. i’ve never seen her before, and she’s not out there now, so maybe (hopefully) she doesn’t like what my garden and i have to offer, and i’ll not have to shield my whole garden in reams and reams of plastic deer-protectant wrap.