This just in: not a vampire

I'm reading a book by the very funny novelist Christopher Moore about young, unsuspecting, and otherwise ordinary vampires in San Francisco. I stay up late reading until I nod off in the chair by the fire. I get up and straggle in to work and drink coffee in my new cube by the 8-foot by 8-foot window on the east side of the building, and joy of joys in the heart of central swingstate, I feel the sun coming in directly in my face. There are check-in tasks to accomplish, e-mails to read and answer, schedules and calendars to remind me of what I'm doing, and lists to prioritize. Then, halfway through my large mug of java, I stand by the floor-to-ceiling window and stretch my creaking, awakening limbs, enjoying the morning sun and thinking, okay, I might live.

I'm clearly not a vampire. Sunshine is my friend. My other friend Gaylord gave a sermon a few weeks ago outlining a kind of theology of sunlight. Briefly, and this in no way comes close to the scope of Gaylord's well-researched argument, it is possible to reconcile a scientific understanding of the physical universe with a theology of a loving and caring community, and one way to do it is to gratefully face the rising sun every morning. I'm with you, Gaylord.

I've mentioned this proposition to several people, and I always get the same (like duh) response, which is what happens whenever I make a major discovery that everybody else knew all along. Reprising a mid-1970s mimeographed chapbook of poems entitled "Belaboring the Obvious," yes, of course we all knew this, but somehow it does some good, as we head into the rainy midwestern winter, to restate this truism.

Gaylord is a recovering Lutheran from North Dakota, so I'm guessing he knows a thing or two about seasonal affective discombobulation. As a SAD fellow-sufferer, and a recovering Methodist from Minnesota, I'm leaving the shades open whenever possible, glare (blinding light in the face, or that look from co-workers trying to read their computer screens) or no glare.