I have a pretty early commute on Thursday mornings, a 6:00 am start to my day that, no matter how much I do it, still seems almost a novelty. Getting up and dressing in the dark and trotting out to the corner to catch a bus into Downtown, then picking up a trolley and making the slow rail trip back to Dormont, my thoughts drift to other early mornings, the roads and places traveled through before the sun even had a chance to fully rise.
I think about rising for school all those years, how difficult it was to go from cozy in bed to the cold, sterile school environment. I think about early morning band practices, shivering through thicker and thicker jackets as the season went on. I think about college, years spent staying up into the wee hours only to get up two hours later to make it to class (or the unfortunate times that getting up two hours later never happened). I think about getting up super early for family road trips down to see my grandmother in Florida, usually sometime around 4 am. We’d be out of Pennsylvania before the sun rose, crossing the border into WV with the light still an hour away. I think of that highway terrain.
I think of Waffle House.
