I was fortunate to spend 10 days in the tropics this past winter. If you asked me how my getaway was, I would be as apt to tell you about the crowing of roosters as about the warmth and light.

We rented a place in a neighborhood with an abundance of roosters. I had never before found myself trying to sleep amidst the crowing of roosters, and I can report that anyone who thinks, as I did, that roosters only crow a few times daily to mark daybreak misses the roosters’ point entirely. My roosters struck their first note as early as 3:30 in the morning, and were going full tilt boogie by 5, a full two hours before sunrise. Although a group of roosters is properly called a “flock,” a “bedlam of roosters” captures it better for me.

I am far from oblivious to the fact that being awakened early and kept awake by the crowing of roosters in the Caribbean on a respite from a New England winter is a luxury problem. I’m aware that roosters interfering with my sleep is a fraction of a pinprick compared to the travail of others in a sorely troubled world. As I’ve heard it said, “There is nothing on this earth as small as a human being wrapped up in himself.” But that perspective did not prevent me from grousing about the rooster racket, any more than the knowledge that I have an ever-diminishing number of healthy days left on this earth always keeps me from sweating the small stuff.

Like a lot of folks who write, I usually do so when I wake up, because I have my best energies then. Even when I had a “job of work” other than my writing, I would set the alarm so I could write before work. I always write alone, but on my first morning in our rental, I found I was far from alone. Trying to get lost in my writing with a cacophony of crowing outside turned out to be for me like trying to get lost in a movie when someone sitting near me in the theater is playing their popcorn bag like Jerry Lee Lewis played the piano.

I had just finished a column, and was trying to search my mind for the subject matter of the next one, but every time I started to zero in, a rooster would crow fortissimo. After a while of this, I decided to search the internet on the subject of rooster crowing, to take a dive down the rooster hole, if you will.

First, I searched to see if any writer considered the crowing of roosters to be a positive or at least tenable working condition. I was surprised to find a few such writers, one of whom really stood out. The poet Oliver Baez Bendorf wrote a collection of poems entitled “Consider the Rooster,” a finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, inspired by the crowing of a rooster he named Walter Mercado. As the blurb put it, “‘Consider the Rooster’ serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.”

What that poet did with rooster crowing put me to shame. Where he had found a catalyst for awakening, I found a catalyst for kvetching.

To get away from my hand-wringing, I thought I’d look into quotes about the crowing of roosters. On the lists I checked, I found three quotes by a Turkish writer named Mehmet Murat ildan  (he uses a lowercase I for his surname). It turned out that he churns out quotes about anything under the sun, or in the case of rooster crowing, before the sun comes up. In other words, he generates his own “quotable quotes” as an art form of sorts. He does this because, as he puts it, “A book of 10,000 quotes is a lifetime project.”  

Ildan’s approach to quotes as art caused me to wonder what quote I might leave for posterity out of all the words I’ve written in my lifetime. I decided it would be these 11 words spoken by a character in an old play of mine: “Life would be a lot different if carrots tasted like chocolate.” 

Anyway, a quote by Ildan I thought of as a keeper was: “This morning do something different. When you wake up this morning, wake your forgotten and forsaken dreams up as well. Wake them up like an insisting rooster.” 

The first thing I felt when I read this quote was admiration for the author’s choice of the adjective “insisting.” The perseverance of the roosters’ crowing, their ignorance of my heartfelt desire for them to shut up, was indeed insistent.

Then I pictured the quote as a line in a Tennessee Williams play, perhaps entitled “Rooster, Wake My Dreams.” 

Next I went to the Old Farmer’s Almanac website to see if I could find the reasons why roosters crow, what their endgame was in making all the noise. I learned that one of the reasons is to “communicate their dominance.” I could not help but think that is also the reason Homo sapiens crow, as in the case of a political figure who came to mind.

When I reached that point in my rooster dive, I found myself identifying with the allegorical story about the little boy who sees a large pile of horse manure and shouts joyously, “Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!” When asked by an adult why a pile of manure gets him so excited, the boy answers, “With so much horse poop, there must be a pony here somewhere.” 

Likewise, I had acted as if I believed that with such a clatter of crowing, there must be a column around somewhere.

I think I found it.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.