Good Morning
Saturday, October 25th, 2008
The house is generally open and awake before anyone leaves in the morning, but today I went out to the grocery without parting the curtains or stirring a soul.
I rose just as the outside was turning from purple to blue and, it was in this shade that I found the cupboards as empty as old Mother Hubbard’s. My disappointment, though, was secondary to the hunger the sleeping bodies upstairs would feel upon waking. Ten minutes later, I had already returned to the still-slumbered children and the dark, cool rooms.
I’d come back in the frontdoor with the morning newspaper under my arm, a jug of milk and a bag of food in the other. The cats were angry that I hand’t fed them so I poured some nuggets from a dusty bag into their food bowls. I sat alone at the dining room table oblivious to the light or the quiet and ate shredded wheat while scanning the day’s headlines that are really news from the day before.
Quiet or a sense of calm aren’t ordinary here during the week. These moments have to be stolen. There are no backwoods with trees and feathery weed clumps to crouch behind and lose yourself like I did what I was a child. I remember making a pledge to myself to stay young my whole life – young at heart – and it’s a promise I’ve kept and a time recreated through my children’s lives.
One autumn morning on a Saturday like this, a friend that was sleeping over and I rose, dressed in warm clothes and went up on the hillside that stretched behind my home and others on the street. We buried oursleves in leaves while watching green house workers load big trucks. The children on the block were a concern to the nursery owners though we never did any harm to them, but they would often shout threats across the barbed wire fence and run us off when they could.
So it was easy that morning to create our own sense of fear of what these men might do to us of we were spotted in the red and brown dropped leaves. If I’d known the fears of adulthood then – the creditor on the doorstep, the unpredictable economy, corporate cutbacks not tied to performance but market direction, I would have abandoned those thoughts for something less serious or even cheerful.
But what we did was lay still and I eventually roamed those hillsides so often I would expect the trees and the bushes there still remembr me. The branches we climbed, the thorny vines that grew up the bark in one groping of trees, I can remember in the clarity of this day. The homemade steps my neighbor cut into the hillside so her elderly legs could traipse up and down its face with a garden hose watering the seeds she’d dropped into the soil churned with burned charcoal from the rail line that come through our backyards as long ago as Eden. We kids would occasionally pull up an old rusted railroad spike with wonderment and contemplate its value, which to us was priceless.
I should have known then I was destined for the writer’s life, to be haunted by detail and the world I see, constantly running the issues and events through my own personal filter, and yet being strangely undamaged and unimpressed by most of it and yet again still managing to live passionately, to bring new life here.
The passion is harder gotten at dawn. If I can prod myself from the covers at 5:30, I’m cognizant of a point when the dawn seems as though it might actually break – hold itself right as it is, the sky only a shade brighter than night and yet expecting of the heat, like a pan set on a cold burner.
I was so eager to join the day today, out early the way I’d been as a boy, my appearance halfway presentable with sleepy hair matted down by palm-fulls of water. I’d put on the rumpled clothes I’d worn the day before and left on the bathroom floor where I’d undressed: a flannel shirt with a mock turtleneck portruding from the collar. My pajamas were still inside my jeans as though a hollow man was wearing them, a very careful scarecrow who’d not left behind a single straw.
Every evening I promise to myself to rise early, to record my thoughts when the day is the most peaceful, but I sleep through the alarm, just an imitation writer amond the rows of Kansas corn and wheat – the sleep making my intentions to write as distant as my childhood.
