"Gray Morning, Two Habits"

Tennessee Williams is a brilliant playwright. His *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof*, the 1958 Hollywood version starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, is absolutely captivating and unforgettable.

Peekskill woke me before I was ready — not with thunder, not with rain, not with anything dramatic enough to justify the interruption. Just a cloudless gray, that strange kind of sky that looks like it forgot to put its face on. A watercolor with no pigment. A mood without a name.

Some of us like to wake up to silence, to ease ourselves back into the world like slipping into a lukewarm bath. I’m one of those. I like the slow return from whatever dream‑state I was wandering through — that nowhere place where you’re alive but not accountable. I like the hush. The drift. The quiet reassembly of self.

But then there are the others — the ones who wake up with you, whether planned or unplanned, whether welcome or not — and immediately reach for their phones like they’re clocking in for a shift. And suddenly the room is filled with YouTube shorts. And one of them — always one — features that person laughing like a Cheshire cat who swallowed a megaphone. That laugh. That awful, synthetic, caffeinated cackle that slices straight through my silence.

I hate that one.

And when two people wake up this way — one craving quiet, the other summoning digital chaos — you start to wonder about compatibility. Especially after a dozen polite requests to please, for the love of all that is holy, put your damn earbuds in. Because nothing ruins a morning faster than someone else’s noise invading your peace before you’ve even located your own pulse.

But I’ll admit something: not every morning is a monastery for me. Some mornings I need noise too. I’ll put on music, or one of those self‑help videos that promise to fix the soul in under ten minutes. Other mornings I crave a classic film noir — something with cigarette smoke and moral ambiguity. Or Tennessee Williams, always with Elizabeth Taylor or Paul Newman sweating through their lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And then there are the days when it’s Burton and Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, tearing each other apart with dialogue so sharp it could slice fruit.

It’s the dialogue I’m after. The rhythm. The way a story can wake you up better than sunlight.
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Yes, two people from two different worlds, two different cultures, two different generations and morning philosophies — they can live together without stepping on each other’s throats. They can wake up differently and still meet in the kitchen later, still share coffee, still laugh about something stupid, still find a way to be gentle.

It just takes a little courtesy. A little awareness. A little willingness to let the other person have their version of morning without trespass.

Because even on a cloudless gray day, even when the sky forgets itself, two people can still find a way to start the day without ruining it for the other.
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And that, I suppose, is its own kind of noir miracle.