“April is the cruelest month” wrote T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” his monumental poem considered by many the greatest of the 20^th century. It’s full of contradictory thoughts such as lilacs emerging from the dead ground after winter. The line kept reverberating in my mind while I missed the first of my self-imposed goal to post at least two pieces on my blog since starting this website.

Four separate groups of out-of-town friends visited during April, and it was fun, even as we fitted them in between the days in a calendar chock-a-block full of medical appointments. But then at the month’s end came the painful decision to euthanize our wonderful, beautiful Great Dane Lotte, probably the last in a long line of nine of these majestic dogs we have known and loved over the years.

The details appear as an ending to Great Dane in the Morning, my as yet unpublished book that you can read here if you like.

And now to get caught up in May.

A friend sent this video of a Great Dane puppy reluctant to rise up from the comfort of his owners’ bed. She said it made her think of us because, I assume, that has always been our dog breed of choice. I’m not sure if she also knows that reluctance to wake up in the morning is a trait I share with that puppy.

I’ve written before about our current Great Dane Lotte and how she stays in her bed until I drag myself out of my own bed across the room. As I make my slow way up the stairs to the living room, she similarly hauls herself up behind me, eventually flopping down again on the floor and going back to sleep. It’s something I’d also like to do most mornings but don’t. There are the papers to read and the email to check and, in a while, a dog to be fed and walked. But getting to that point is, for me, hard. One of my daughters told her high school friends, “My mother gets up at 5, but she wakes up at 10.”

A few years back, at a sorority reunion – older women trying to relive their college years – I came down the steps the first morning to the cacophony of many women’s voices, bright and chipper-sounding and made my way in silence to the coffee machine. I found a corner to sit, just me and my coffee cup, but a woman came up and tried to start a conversation. I grunted. Another woman, my roommate when we lived in this sorority house, told my interlocutor, “Don’t try to talk to her until she’s had her coffee.” My roommate from long ago remembered! I was touched.

In the early days of our marriage, and indeed for many years, Ed would bring me coffee in bed, a lovely perk of marriage, I thought. He’d bring his own coffee and the papers and we’d sit in bed drinking coffee and reading the papers, even on work mornings. I wonder what became of that practice and when it ended. Perhaps when we bought reading chairs and designated part of the living room “the library.”

Medical experts are now saying that teenagers need to sleep longer in the morning and some schools are trying to accommodate by starting classes later. That leads me to think, once again, I was born in the wrong time. Or else, disturbing thought, that I’ve never actually grown up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71smG5d29to

[Photo: “Shameless,” pewter sculpture by Louise Peterson