Woke This Morning

I am not sure when my personal habit of Woke started, though I do know it comes from a time in my life when the bathroom was not entirely my own. I’m equally uncertain why I called it Woke in the first place, though claiming that I called it anything is a bit of an exaggeration. As best I remember, the word just popped into my head at the sink one morning in the mid-1970s when I decided hot water wasn’t worth the wait.

Woke wasn’t a word that I used, exactly. I never said it. Never wrote it. Hardly even thought it. I acknowledged it but only with a blank, unspoken salutation — as if to a familiar landmark passed daily on a routine commute.

I’m not actually sure I even thought of it as a word. Its meaning wasn’t exactly concrete. I never pictured it in Times New Roman. I never imagined it pronounced by Colin Firth. It couldn’t form a clue on Jeopardy! that anybody (other than me) might solve in the form of a question. My Woke existed in some...