I am emphatically not a morning person. But my daughter had an early flight out, and Oakland Airport isn’t far enough away from the MacArthur Maze, which recently made the news when a double-tanker gas truck crashed, exploded, and melted two layers of freeway ramps; we had no idea how much extra time we had to allow for with that mess.

Turned out, there was a major backup starting just ahead of where we got off 880 for the airport, and the three of us made good time after all. But it was way too early in the day, and all I wanted to do after waving goodbye was to go home and crawl back into bed.

Just as we got past the Dunbarton Bridge over the San Francisco Bay, I, in the passenger seat of our Prius, happened to glance up at the driver next to us, riding high in a large white pickup. He was watching the road but glancing repeatedly past us at the salt marshes alongside the roadway there: it wasn’t much past sunrise, and the sky and the marsh were beautiful. Shore birds were flying, it was a new day, and that man had the biggest smile on his face.

Without even knowing it or being aware of me, he was showing me what he saw, so I could see too.