Peas

It's easy to startle me. Come up behind me and say something, I'll leap six inches into the air. The other afternoon in the movie theater, when the characters on screen were in a haunted house, I knocked over my almost-empty drink cup. And if I get woken up by an alarm, I'm jumpy all day.

This morning I got woken up by the telephone. It's actually a cell phone, and it plays a gentle little melody, but nevertheless it made me sit up in bed, heart pounding, dreams rushing away from me.

It's a snow day here; we got four or five inches. I would have liked to sleep through more of it, but now here I am, very wide awake indeed, feeling like the titular peas in this poem by Michael David Madonick:

Some things don't want to be
uncovered. My son, in the morning
especially, doesn't want to be

uncovered. The egg, deep in its shell,
tight as the can of coffee, or
the milk, quiet in cardboard, or the chicken,

almost gone in the ice-box, they don't
want to be uncovered. They give you a hard
look, like you've caught them by

surprise, you've been rude when there
was no thought of being rude.
I remember how black sea bass would run

close to the shore at low
tide. Sometimes I would see them there,
through the water at my knees,

darting like comets after crabs or
smaller fish. They were fast.
I imagine if they bothered to look up,

they'd look like my son,
startled, unnerved, insulted by the fact
they were being watched,

simply observed. Sometimes when I open
a can of peas I think
about the universe, about the depth of

darkness, about whether if
the sky full of stars were turned back
like the top of a can, I'd

be angry, annoyed, or would someone
else, looking in
from the other side, complain.

Now I'm thinking of the Heinlein story "Goldfish bowl" and whether the bunny who is spending the winter in our dining room minds when we do have to get up for school and someone turns the light on, rather than letting the dawn illuminate his room slowly, the way he's used to from all his years outside.

Waking up to this much snow was a kind of rude awakening all by itself, I think. Did any of you have a rude awakening this morning?