I love the quiet of my office when I get in early in the morning. The rest of the people in my office usually come in an hour after me. They mistakenly believe that I am a morning person. But they have the concepts of �morning person� and �early riser� mixed up. I get up early, in part to be able to be home after school and in part to get Kat off before the crack of dawn, but I am not a morning person as anyone who has viewed me trying to awaken knows.

Gregarious as I often am, lack of human contact first thing in the morning is a luxury that I have only recently re-discovered. Kat�s high school begins much too early in the morning so she must leave the house by 6:35 a.m. or so. With that change in her school day, she and Day-Hay were no longer getting up at the same time---and Kat and I discovered something. We are very compatible in the morning.

Like me, Kat is not a morning person. Like me, she has discovered that ritual---first we get up, then we go to the kitchen, then we eat the same cereal each morning, then we get dressed (or in her case, go downstairs to hunt for clothes)---goes a long way in making morning doable with a minimum of stress. For her, as for me, conversation is something one engages in only after puttering around. It takes time for the brain to find the pathway of nerves to the mouth and life is far smoother if one does not open one�s mouth until the brain is at least partially engaged. So we each do our own thing in companionable silence until it is time to depart and our minds are beginning to work.

Day-Hay is swifter in the morning. Day-Hay may try to linger in bed because she is dragging or tired but she is seeking engagement. She wants conversation. She wants supervision. She wants attention. Her search too often puts her on a collision course with a mother who craves (but is as yet unable to actively seek) disengagement---and when the collision threatens, her mother is still too stupid to know how to steer to avoid it.

No wonder mornings began to run smoother when Mr. Philately took over getting Day-Hay (and, in those days, Kat) off to school. He prefers to wake up later than I do but when he wakes, he really wakes. He can think. He can talk. He can reason through minor emergencies such as a missing math book. He can supervise without melting down into a puddle on the kitchen floor.

And now, as a side benefit to getting up early, my time at work is running more smoothly. I come in before anyone is here and start with the little tasks that take time but little thought. I enter time records from my notebook to my computerized system. I get out some form letters. I file and do other largely mindless tasks until my mind kicks in.

Some of the best mornings of my life were spent almost alone out on a dock with my father-in-law, each of us with a coffee cup in our hand, wordlessly watching dawn break over Lake Okiboji. Sometimes I didn�t drink the coffee; I just held it. The ritual called for having coffee, not necessarily for drinking it (and it still does but the coffee now is decaffeinated). Being alone in my office as the sun comes up is almost as good, but not quite.

It�s so much nicer to break into morning than to have morning breaking in to me.

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