Ah, retirement

For two mornings straight, Cliff has gotten up with me, at the crack of dawn.  This morning I wanted to introduce him to the loveliness that is early morning. 
"We should go out and watch the sun come up," I said to him.  
I heard the reluctance in his voice when he said, "Let me go get a shirt on."  
He was wearing nothing but his tighty-whities.  
"Cliff, I wouldn't be scared to go outside stark naked now that we're back here behind the barn.  I always just go out in my nightgown.  There's nobody in a position to see us here."  
He mumbled something, but agreed to go out as he was.
There are some things I had forgotten when I invited Cliff outside at the crack of dawn.  
Because of the arthritis that plagues him, he can barely move when he first gets out of bed.  Some mornings he can't bend down to tie his shoes; I have done it for him a few times when he needed to get going pretty fast.  
Speaking of shoes, Cliff does NOT go outside barefoot.  He's very tender-footed, and if he steps on so much as a grain of sand, he yells as though he'd stepped on a nail.  
However, I assured him that once we walked over about three feet of sidewalk, we'd be walking on the nice, soft grass.  
"Grass won't hurt your feet," I told him.  "Grass is soft."  
We picked up our coffee cups, me walking at a spritely pace, Cliff listing to the left and shuffling along as he's prone to do in the early morning fresh out of bed.  
He stepped gingerly from the sidewalk onto the wet grass and we made our way to the chairs:  one is my gravity chair, the other just an ordinary, sit-up-straight lawn chair.  
"Take your pick," I said.  
He chose the gravity chair, obviously a bad choice, since he kept trying different positions and looking uncomfortable.  So we switched chairs, and he agreed the ordinary chair was better.  
Birds were waking up and singing, but of course Cliff has constant tinnitus in one ear.  "Can you hear the birds at all?" I asked.  
"No, all I can hear is these crickets chirping in my ear."  
After about ten minutes outside, I could see this wasn't Cliff's favorite thing; he was wanting the comfort of his recliner... not that he complained, but I could tell.  
So we came inside to drink the rest of our coffee.  
I guess I'll leave Cliff inside when I go out to see the sunrise.  Some things are better enjoyed alone.  


On another note, we just got back from our first motorcycle ride together since my knee replacement; I was comfortable the whole time (about an hour-and-a-half), and we got back about five minutes before it started raining.  Perfect!  Most enjoyable.