Whenever I wake up before sunrise, I think first of my grandma, who was always up before us when we stayed with her in New Ulm, Minnesota—working in the kitchen and listening to the crop prices. Then, I think of all the winter mornings when I woke before dawn to go to high school. Fucking high school.

I went to high school from 1989 to 1993 in St. Paul, and though that means I attended school through four falls and four springs, my default memory of high school mornings is freezing, freezing, freezing cold. My alarm would go off, and I’d lie in bed for a few minutes listening to the classic rock station I preferred to the top 40 station because top-40 music was so stereotypically adolescent.

As Bob Seger and Supertramp chugged along, I’d roll out of bed onto the bright-green carpet I’d requested when my parents redecorated the house and, after showering, get dressed in my school uniform:

• Button-down blue shirt, with scientific calculator, pen, mechanical pencil, and eraser-pen tucked into the pocket. (No pocket protector—that would have been nerdy.)
• St. Agnes sweatshirt.
• Grey Farah slacks, as worn by bus drivers and Mr. Burns: polyester (after graduation, we made a bonfire and watched our pants melt) and weirdly indestructible, despite being so paper-thin that I had to wear long underwear lest my legs chafe in the icy winds.
• Black shoes. Unlike the boys who tried to pass sneakers off as uniform shoes by blacking out the stripes, I’d gone for the business-casual mode that allowed me to wear Reeboks and still look like I was planning to spend the day in a cubicle.

There was no waiting for the shower, since I was up and out the door each morning before anyone else in my family woke. They all had short commutes: my younger siblings had a two-block walk to grade school, my dad had a leisurely drive along the Mississippi River to downtown Minneapolis (“I don’t know why anybody takes 94 in the morning”), and my mom worked at the university that sat four blocks to the west. Me? I had to catch the number seven bus.

Breakfast was a packet of three microwave pancakes, doused in Aunt Jemima. I’d crack the front door—a preview of the black-skied Hoth I’d soon have to spend 20 minutes walking through—and grab the morning’s St. Paul Pioneer Press. Being cosmopolitan, we also took the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but I’d go for the St. Paul paper because it had the best comic strips—including a Batman serial, though it was more boring than Mark Trail—as well as both Dear Abby and Ann Landers.

My favorite feature, though, was the page where the paper printed call-in reader comments. These comments didn’t concern substantive news, like letters to the editor would—they were chit-chat about trivia and lifestyle topics. The comments were contributed largely by the elderly population of St. Paul and, once, by me. I already had an adult voice—I’d occasionally call Fidelity Investments and inform them I was considering making an investment so they’d send a prospectus, just because I liked getting mail—and I’m sure I sounded just like all the rest of the day’s callers when I left a message complaining about those “gol darn pumpkin bags that people leave out way after Halloween.” I imagine the editor took the cause of my voice impediment to be dentures (it was a retainer), and he published my rant as a glamorous pull-out quote.

Then I’d make my lunch, which I’d carry in a troll-adorned reusable lunch bag (this being the 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth era): an apple, a packaged snack, and a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich that I’d deliberately smash up against my frozen juice box or (in my cusp-of-adulthood upperclass years) can of pop so that by lunchtime, the sandwich would essentially have become a big no-bake cookie.

Finally, I was ready to wrap myself up in my jacket, scarf, and hat and brace for the brisk four-block walk to my bus stop. Feet crunching in the snow, I’d walk past the houses of families I baby-sat, imagining the hip young parents hopping out of bed into their fleece jackets and Lands’ End slippers; past the houses of elderly couples, imagining them making coffee and listening to the crop prices; and past the house of a neighbor girl I had a crush on, imagining her stirring and stifling a pheromonal yawn as she lay in a four-poster bed wearing a skimpy silk negligee.

Then came the religious portion of my morning, as I stood on the corner of Selby and Cleveland, watching my clouds of breath rise under the streetlight and praying to the God I still believed in—I wore a brown scapular under my sock around my ankle—that the bus would come now, that those headlights would be the bus, that please God the bus will be coming up the hill right now so I may have surcease from these subzero conditions.

Eventually the bus would come, and I’d offer my student fare card to be punched ($1.25 during peak morning hours). I’d then take a seat in the back of the bus with the girl sneaking bites of a hidden doughnut, the future nun (actually) wearing giant glasses and fishnet stockings (her hyper-religious family apparently being ignorant of any impure associations with such garb), and the stocky boy wearing purple jeans because he thought they looked cool (he’d change into his uniform in the locker room) while listening to Christian rap on a portable CD player in a case slung round his neck.

I’d crack whatever mass-market paperback science fiction novel I was reading—Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin—and look up only when the bus came to a stop. I’d peer at the billboards displayed near each stop, and came to attribute a mythic significance to their bimonthly changes—especially the one at Prior and St. Anthony, where we had a long daily wait. If it advertised a hardware store, I’d think, it’s telling me I need to work harder. If it advertised a film, I’d think, it’s a sign that my dream of becoming a movie critic will one day come true. If it advertised a loan shark, I’d think, it’s telling me I need to stop spending my baby-sitting money on the fundraising candy bars I’m supposed to be selling and pay back the neighbor guy for the used Texas Instruments computer I bought from him.

Finally the bus, having slowly snaked its way up from St. Paul’s gentrifying Merriam Park neighborhood to the working-class Frogtown neighborhood—then, unbeknownst to oblivious young me, a hotbed of gang wars—would stop under the green onion dome of St. Agnes Church and I’d climb the well-worn stairs to the third floor of Gruden Hall. I’d open my locker—painted “shit brown” in the candid assessment of the art teacher, its interior decorated with starfighters photocopied from the Star Wars role-playing game guidebook—and trade my backpack and winter gear for the grammar text I’d need in homeroom.

In Mr. Schmitz’s English classroom, while I waited for the walking-distance students to exercise their privilege of sauntering in almost late, I’d sit on the radiator and try to warm up while I looked out the window and watched the sun rise over the flat, grey, residential expanse of my home town.

– Jay Gabler

Photo by Micah Taylor (Creative Commons)