Finding myself at the beach this Saturday morning, I woke up a bit before 7. My cramped shoulder, from the drive the day before, was still bothering me after a restless night. But it took me about 15 minutes to decide not to take a muscle relaxer and go back to sleep for hours, and to go see the beach sunrise instead.
That made me a bit late for the actual sunrise itself, at 7:38. My first pictures, one of which you see above, were taken about nine minutes after the definitive moment. But as you can see, a bank of clouds blocks the horizon, so the sun was just beginning to come into sight.
As you can also see, the beach is not what you would call overpopulated, even if you are a devoted disciple of Paul Ehrlich. This trend continued, as I went down the beach and visited the new pier. I encountered few fishermen, one of them who hadn’t unpacked his gear and was leaning on the rail, taking his time finishing his Red Bull. A guy sweeping the pier at the shore end of the pier. A couple of people near him setting up a booth — for what, I couldn’t tell. An occasional walker like myself.
Almost everyone was quite cordial in offering a friendly “good morning,” although no one was seeking further conversational engagement. No one wished to break the spell of a beautiful new morning.
Since I would normally be sitting at the breakfast table at about this time doing a Dutch lesson on Duolingo, I thought, “We zijn de morgen mensen.”
We are the morning people.
Later, I would question myself on that. Dutch has the same problem as Spanish. The Dutch use “morgen” for both “morning” and “tomorrow.” As Spanish speakers do with “mañana.” When they wish to be precise, the Dutch have an alternative word for morning: ochtend. (I’m sure there’s some rule for when to say “morgen” and when “ochtend,” but Duolingo doesn’t teach rules.)
I later checked Google Translate. Sure enough, my we zijn de morgen mensen translates as “We are the morning people.” (Although maybe I should have formed a compound noun, morgenmensen.) So I felt good there. But if I do it the other way around, asking for the Dutch translation of that English statement, I get Wij zijn de ochtendmensen.
Oh, well. “We are the tomorrow people” sounds pretty cool, too. And I wanted to express my momentary sense of kinship with these few mensen who were up with me.
It was a nice walk, and as I write, this is still a beautiful morning…
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