The amazingly beautiful mornings of old-time and modern Phoenix, Arizona


Unlike most of the people I've ever known in a longish life, that I call "ten to twos" (meaning that they feel their most energetic only after 10 am and up to 2 am), I'm someone who always seem to fall asleep long before the best bands would even begin to start playing, somewhere. I'd be home in bed, and after eight hours I'd wake up to some of the most glorious mornings that you can imagine.

Growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I HATED mornings, and not just because all kids do. It gets COLD there, and delivering newspapers at 5 am remains one of those painful memories of my life. Not so in Phoenix!

We're having a heatwave today, and it will be well over 100 degrees for my "ten to two" friends who will never see a Phoenix sunrise. Or if they do, it will be from doing an all-nighter in college, or staying up all night drinking. But the glories of a gorgeous morning in the high seventies after a wonderful night of sleep are denied to them, and that makes me feel kinda sad.

People will often say, rhetorically, "how can people live in Phoenix?", and of course they're simply saying that it's not possible, and that's the end of it. But it is, and my first answer nowadays would be "air conditioning", but my answer to old-time Phoenix, before the invention of that wonderful technology, was early mornings.

I like to imagine the early mornings in old-time Phoenix, when people knew that they had comfortable weather for the first few hours of the morning, and then they'd go home and hunker down, maybe take a nap (a siesta!). These people never had to scrape ice off of the windshields of their cars, they woke up to temperatures that are just wonderful for human beings. I like thinking about that.

The glorious mornings of Phoenix are absolutely precious to me, and I know that they were precious to people in old-time Phoenix. If you haven't experienced them, you're really missing out. No imagination required, it happens at ever sunrise. See you there!

Image at the top of this post: Sunrise in Peoria, Arizona, Saturday, May 30th, 2020.
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