At 5:40 in the morning, the street still belongs to delivery vans, cats, and the occasional person who has made peace with being awake before sunrise.
The bakery on the corner is dark from the outside, but the back room glows. Through the half-open service door comes the warm, unmistakable smell of bread that has only just become bread.
A baker carries trays from oven to rack with the calm speed of someone who has repeated the same sequence thousands of times. Dough, heat, steam, crust. Nothing about it looks hurried, even though everything has to happen on time.
By six-thirty the first loaves are lined up behind the counter. A woman arrives for coffee and leaves with two sesame rings she had not planned to buy. A taxi driver takes a bag of rolls to the car. The town is beginning to turn on one light at a time.
I like places that are already working before most of us know we need them. Bakeries, fish markets, newspaper stands, ferry docks. Their day starts in the invisible hours so the rest of ours can begin normally.
By eight, the bakery will look ordinary. The door will be open, the glass case full, the coffee machine noisy. But if you arrive early enough, you get to see the quiet machinery underneath the ordinary day.
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