CRUNCHY STREETS AND RADIO OMISSIONS

It is just before six o’clock Wednesday morning, the coffee shop is bustling. It snowed here in Colorado most of the day yesterday but the weather must have cleared sometime in the night. Though dark, I can see bright stars in a very cold sky this morning. The streets are crunchy icy and very slick. I wanted to make sure Lucy’s car (that would be the Jeep this morning) had a full tank of gas so she wouldn’t have to stop in the cold to fill it herself today so I rolled out of bed to an earlier alarm than usual and popped over to the Shell station and then decided to grab a few minutes in the coffee shop community before going back home to my studio and the radio show.

It is rare I get up early enough to do anything before the radio show but the gas tank was on my mind so I set the alarm early. Plus, I love driving in fresh-fallen snow. I’m weird that way. In other ways, too, as it turns out.

The Starbucks community at 6 a.m. is a special group. Weekday mornings they are scrubbed and clean and dressed for the workday, but still in need of a java jolt. Contrast that with Sunday morning early. My Sunday routine has me stopping early at a coffee shop near my church to read the Sunday Times (it has a great book review section) and relax a bit on my own, especially on mornings when I’ll be speaking to the congregation. I love the alone time to collect my thoughts. I also love to people watch. On Sundays people drag themselves into the shop disheveled, hair sticking up, old sweat pants on and t-shirts wrinkled as if they slept in them. They have no idea how goofy they look and they don’t care. There will be the occasional person heading early to church, like me, and they’ll be cleaned up. The rest of the crowd, though, arrives unconsciously unkempt, comfortable, with nowhere in particular to be and no thought of appearance distracting their minds.

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It is a bit odd, driving through a fresh snowfall in Colorado to a coffee shop to have a pre-dawn cup before going into my studio to do the radio show which broadcasts in southern Arizona, where there is no snow, no crunchy icy streets. Stranger still is, I won’t even mention my early morning experience here. I talk about just about everything on the show except being in Colorado. The geography of my life is not particularly important to the lives of the listeners. So every morning when I sit down in front of the microphone, I do a subconscious mental shift that puts me in, not my own studio, but the studio in Tucson with the rest of the morning show crew. This is rarely a difficult exercise. I know Tucson as well as I know any other place. On the show, I’m there no matter where I am.

The only time that odd arrangement seems odd is on a morning like this.


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