When I was younger, I was most definitely not a morning person. In fact, I was one of those people who had very little experience of mornings, sleeping right through them most days. That's all changed now, though. The latest I leave the house is 7:20, and usually I'm in the line for coffee by that time. This morning, though, I needed to catch up on some work before I reached the office, so I got up at the ungodly hour of 5:15 and was at Victrola just a little after it opened.
When I got down to 15th Street, I couldn't believe how much activity there was: The QFC, being a 24-hour store, had several cars in the lot; a truck was disgorging its wares outside Rainbow Grocery, and there were already several workers inside stashing away the fresh new produce; and inside the coffee shop at least five tables were already occupied with folks reading the paper, writing the Great American Novel, or studying from massive text books. Meanwhile, thousands were asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, asleep in granite Aberdeen.
In general, the workday starts earlier on the West Coast. There's the obvious time-zone aspect: To maximize the shared working hours with East Coast clients and co-workers, we start early and they start late. But I swear Seattle has more early birds than any city I've lived in: Crew teams are in the water by 5 a.m., smart commuters avoid evening bridge traffic by getting their hours in before traffic gets crazy, and folks line up outside coffee shops at 6 a.m. to get their first espresso of the day.
UPDATE 10/15: Spookily enough, the
Seattle P-I did a
piece about 15th Street's (Sunday) morning mood today.
