Tell us about your morning routine.
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My morning routine isn’t a routine. It’s a job-site checklist I dressed up in pajamas.
The alarm goes off at 4:45, which is a time that exists only because of roofing and regret. I set it the night before, and every night I fall asleep convinced the man who set it was either an enemy or an optimist. The man who wakes up to it is neither. He’s just a man who needs coffee.
The coffee maker is the first honest thing in my house every morning. A Mr. Coffee on a timer, loaded the night before with Folgers, because the 4:45 version of me cannot be trusted to measure anything. Black. Two mugs before anyone else is awake, because Giang has informed me — gently, the way you’d talk to a man holding a running circular saw — that I am not a person until the second one.
She’s right.
By 5:15 I’m checking the sky before I check my phone. Old habit. Twenty years of roofing has turned me into a weatherman with a mortgage. I open the radar app the way other men check the stock market — same anxiety, better accuracy, and nobody ever got sued by the weatherman. I’ve watched a bad forecast take money straight off a roof, so I treat the radar like it owes me an apology.
Then it’s the truck. Boots by the door where I left them the night before, staged, because “do it right or do it twice” applies at 4:45 a.m. just like it applies to flashing a chimney. Cooler, ladder straps, the day’s list on the passenger seat. If something’s missing at 5:30, it’s missing all day — and the man who pays for it is the man who staged it.
The kids are the part of the routine I don’t control. Three kids under seven, homeschooling at the kitchen table, and they wake up the way smoke alarms go off — suddenly, at full volume, and you’re never quite sure what set them off. Somebody needs help finding a shoe. Somebody else is crying about the wrong color cup. I used to think my morning had a schedule. Then I had children.
Now it has a shape.
Giang is already up, because of course she is. Daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. She was raised to feed whoever shows up at the door, and in this house the door is the kitchen at 6 a.m. There is always rice. There is always something on the stove. I drink my coffee and watch her run the morning like a dispatch center, and I have never once suggested an improvement. I am not a brave man, but I am not a stupid one.
By 6:30 the house is awake and the truck is warm. I kiss my wife, step over a Lego minefield that will absolutely be there again tomorrow, and drive toward whatever roof the day ordered up. Sometimes I look in the rearview at the kitchen window and think: that was the hardest part of the day, and it didn’t involve a single shingle.
The routine works. Coffee, boots, kids, truck. Do it right the first time — because at 4:45 in the morning, doing it twice isn’t a philosophy. It’s a threat.
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