The magic hour

3ish a.m. has been an almost magical hour in my life for over half a century now. As a teenager, I belonged to the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), run by Harvard Observatory, one of the few high school students in the land to be accepted into the organization. I had passed a field test with my telescope, a six-inch f12.5 reflecting homemade model, and was assigned three variable stars. My job, which I took most seriously, was to estimate their brightness on a regular basis and send my data to the observatory. These stars were scattered through the havens, so usually one of them was best observed after midnight. Through high school, I was frequently crashing early so I could get up around 3, set up my telescope in the back yard, and make my estimations.

When our family camped under the stars in the Mojave desert, as we often did on summer weekends in the 1950s, I'd get up at 3 to use my telescope. What extraordinary skies out there! In the late 40s and early 50s, camping was pretty rare. Some of my parents friends thought they were strange indeed to drive out into the desert to sleep on the ground. We did the same thing when we'd drive from California to New Jersey to visit relatives, camping as much as staying in a motel. We almost never put up a tent. We usually slept under the stars.

In the Army, as a Russian Linguist we worked on shifts and my favorite shift became "Mids", midnight to 8 a.m., for a variety of reasons. Before work, the mess hall was virtually empty and we could order meals from a wider variety of choices. Want steak and eggs? The cook would make it for you. Want some strange concoction assembled from dinner leftovers and whatever? The cook would comply.

I also enjoyed getting off at 8 and going downtown to party. Through my life, I've often preferred partying in the morning rather than at night. In the bars, I found a more interesting assembly of drinkers then, with more interesting stories, than at night. You found the hardcore drinkers in the morning, the social drinkers at night. I found more material to steal as a writer from the former. I was able to mix with them without joining them.

Today I usually crash around 10, get up around 3, then crash again for an hour or two around 5 ... between 3 and 5 I do the day's first work.