Diane and I stayed up late watching The Bourne Supremacy, so I wasn’t all that thrilled when my internal sunrise alarm clock began ringing at 6:10. I hit the snooze alarm but woke up every ten minutes until I lurched out of bed at 6:40. I peeked through the drawn curtains to see pink promise, then with the lights out and trying hard not to wake Diane, I dressed myself and, quietly, but still half asleep, walked out onto the balcony.

Sitting next to our room was a middle aged gay guy who launched on me like I was his long lost best friend.”It’s beautiful isn’t it? I couldn’t sleep. We’re here another day and then we go back home. I’m from Pennsylvania.”I was so groggy I could barely babble enough to escape his verbal clutches. What the hell was he doing sitting outside at this hour on a Sunday in ten degree weather? Why was he talking to me? No, don’t tell me. I left him in mid-sentence with some comment about getting closer to the ocean and I walked across the street for my non-telephone wire view of the rising sun. Except where the sun should have been were clouds too thick to fly through. Pink on either side but opaque in the middle.

Optimistically, I hurried back across the parking lot to my car and drove to Adam’s suggested Neddick Nubble which appeared from afar to be the perfect spot. Except the old lighthouse, adorned with Christmas lights, sat proudly right in front of that cloud bank behind which might have been a rising sun.I tried different vantage points but none mattered because I’d missed my best opportunity which occurred twenty-four hours ago.

**************

Last night we ate dinner at the Village Inn and were served by Shane from Chicago. We were this close to asking him if he were named after the character in the 50’s movie, but the next four grey-haired parties beat us to it.

We’re in York, Maine, which is a few minutes more than an hour’s drive from Acton. Online, I found a cheap motel that sits across the street from the Atlantic and, since it’s so close to Boston, it defines an area we’d never go to in season. Too crowded, like Revere Beach north. But now we’re one of about ten other cars sharing a 115 slot parking lot.

Last night, after dinner at The Harborside, where we met Ashley (our waitress) who graduated last year from Plymouth State and is now taking a year off before she maybe moves to the Seattle area to teach, we watched “A Beautiful Mind. ” Diane’s second time and almost my first, which is to say I caught bits and pieces of a movie that seemed overly long but ended with a bang. I don’t know who I liked more, the real people in the movie or those delusional character’s in Nash’s mind. I could use some direction from a guy like Ed Harris.

This morning, I woke up too late to catch the sunrise which happens directly across the street. Tomorrow I won’t miss it. I remember my first ocean sunrise in 1970. Dan and I’d planned on getting up at 4:30 and driving up to Gloucester. I’ve got slides of the orange orb (what I thought then were dramatic but which now are real yawners) splitting clouds and lifting off the water, and I have two slides of Dan still fast asleep on a mattress on the floor. I couldn’t wake him.

In those far off years, when Dan wasn’t crashing at our place, he would wake before sunrise, jog the .7 miles from his place on Richdale Ave. in Cambridge to our apartment, hop up and down outside my bedroom window while waiting for me to lace up my shoes, and then together we’d run back to his place and have rice cream for breakfast. Rice cream is rice that’s been milled to a fare-thee-well. We’d sprinkle on some soy sauce and feel like we’d eaten the healthiest breakfast imaginable.

Anyway ( I try so hard not to use that word to transition from one thought to another), I was hoping this place would be nicer than it is. I was thinking of arranging some grouping of the grieving parents to take our show on the road, and given the location and the cost, figured this might be it. Only problem is, when I look up from my computer the word fleabag comes to mind.