sunrise on lake michigan

Rose up from sleeplessness this morning at 4:30 a.m. Cousin Jen was asleep in my bed; I hugged her goodbye. She and Mike have been visiting for the weekend, to attend the Pitchfork music festival. Mike writes for Pitchfork. He didn't come back last night because he went to the afterparties and stayed at the Pitchfork office. Jen said that was fine, she'd rather him sleep with "all of his dudes" on the floor of the office than awaken her with his beery snoring. On the one afternoon I attended, the festival did seem to be full of dudes with Comic Book Guy social skills (one ginger I stood near declared loudly, "Anything a DJ does on stage is brilliant, especially DJ Rupture [the solitary, unmoving figure pressing buttons on a bank of electronic devices one at a time onstage as the ginger spoke]") who would disturb their girlfriends' sleep with snores, should God bless them with girlfriends at all. This, of course, does not apply to Mike.

Something kept me up again, and again I don't know what it was. I lay on the couch rehearsing phrases from the songs of the weekend - "Diana," "Donna," and Dvorak's Humoresque No. 7. Olympia played the last for me on Saturday after I came back from band practice. I lay on the couch and listened to her on the violin for ninety minutes, at the end of which I asked her whether she knew how remarkable it was that she could make music of such quality any time she wanted to. Olympia demurred. She found the timbre of her violin shrill relative to the warmth of her viola. I told her about the advice column I read recently in which a middle-aged woman described her love for music; she couldn't play but a few chords on the guitar but strummed them diligently nonetheless, content simply to release a few notes into the atmosphere.

I understood the imperative to hear music. I could listen to Olympia sitting on the arm of the couch playing portions of Partitas all day. We talked about the music; Olympia said that the middle section of the humoresque was satirical, because its minor chords were comically grave in contrast with the light skipping theme of the surrounding sections. She said that it was often transposed to an easier key for young players. She played it in D. I said it was originally G, but I was wrong: it's in Gb major. I heard the first twenty-five notes of it over and over between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. today.

I packed oatmeal into bags, heated up water for tea, and then left the house by bicycle at 4:55 a.m. The streets were all mine. Hardly a car passed me on Milwaukee. (There was only a lonesome cyclist, riding a humping mountain bike with the front wheel terribly out of true.) I waited for no lights, but paused to take pictures of the glass facade of a skyscraper that was exactly the color of the sky, and the emptiness of Jackson and Columbus Boulevards. There was a figure stumbling after a giddy bulldog puppy. Some men were at work spraying water on the sidewalks. Delivery trucks backed slowly into alleys. Otherwise, it was still too dark and quiet for the day's work to begin with any conviction.

(A building the color of the sky in my quiet city at 4:55 a.m.)

I biked past the courthouse and continued on Jackson to the lakefront next to Grant Park, where Harry and I sat for our 2.5 hour Mittagessen mit Bier on the warmest day in early April. A woman in a blue windbreaker was standing on the quay pointing her footlong telephoto lens east, toward the boats bobbing in the marina and the sky lightening far in the distance. I dropped my bike and sat down to watch. The air was not warm but I had hot milk tea from my thermos. Anyway, my heart was racing from the insomnia and the exertion, so I didn't feel the chill.

I took a snapshot every five minutes or so, but my camera was of too poor quality to capture the way the light changed. Everything came out the same shades of magenta and pink. I realized suddenly that I might finally be patient enough now to appreciate Impressionist art. In front of me were small sailboats with their sails drawn down. Dozens of rigs chimed against dozens of metal spars. Gulls squalled overhead. I noted the boats, their reflections on the water, the ripples that a goose couple left behind them, the sky, the sparse clouds, the circling gulls, the busy photographer, the dark buildings to the north, the aquarium and planetarium to the south, and then a swarm of gnats captured my attention and I watched them dancing in a cloud near my head for a while. The horizon was crowded out by boats.

After twenty minutes, a glowing pink line appeared behind a row of boats, and quickly grew into an arc, a crescent, a hemisphere, a boule, and finally, a perfect red circle rising up over Lake Michigan. It was ten times the size of the weak moon I watched rise over the lake from Zion, Illinois, last week. Words appeared on the boats, and I saw that the boat that had been forty feet away from me for half an hour had "Miss Be-Having" painted on it. An increasing population of postdawn speedwalkers, one wearing a gold-accented salwar kameez, passed on the lakefront path behind me. The sun soon became too bright to look at, and I gathered my belongings and left.

I have no occasion to go through my city so early in the morning. I have no business with dawn. My most memorable encounters with city scenes like this have come when I have been traveling abroad and arriving on transportation at odd hours to see ice haulers in Mexico City, fruit vendors in Kaoshiung, etc. The way mornings go in other countries seemed so foreign to my American experience until I learned, today, that it is mornings, not other countries, that feel so alien to me. Today I cruised down the hill at Blommer's Chocolate factory, the one whose operations fill the northwest corner of the Loop with the smell of chocolate chip cookies every day, just before dawn, with an idiotic grin on my face. I was very, very happy to be awake.