BB Grey–musings

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It’s 3:40 in the morning, and I’ve been here before. More times now than I care to remember.
I wake up maybe a little before, open my eyes, stare off into darkness and think I can make out shadows within the stark black. I bring my hands close to my face and check—I can’t see them. Yet I still believe I can see the chair, my crumpled clothes on top, some eight feet from me.

The mind plays the games it plays when the quiet and stillness of morning makes you move in softer-than-ever steps and breathe shallow gulps for fear of stirring the day into reality. Instead you step lightly, catlike in all your moves, and keep the day from starting.

Prayers fill my mind, the first cup of joe in the day devoted to time with the Big Guy. I hand him my schedule and wait for feedback, better yet a blessing, because so often now it seems like I just get myself more twisted up in the misery of my planning and scheduling.

There is a quiet answer, or no answer, and I wonder if I phrased it incorrectly. Maybe stepped out of order on my prayer acronym help word—ACTS—where I always go to the supplication part. The asking is easy, but the Adoration and Thanks start strong but fade fast with the reality of the day at hand, and the Confession? Well that gets ignored all together.

I stir once more. The sheets scissor against flat and fitted, the cold of the morning making them razor sharp. I’m in between, hoping I don’t get cut.

I listen outside for noises.
Cars starting or not starting.
Garbage cans standing as sentries all night long, only to be killed and toppled over, their guts spilling out in last week’s spaghetti and red sauce. A coyote the killer, and now the vultures of coons and rats pick up the pieces. Later people will walk by their own mess and pretend it’s not there, hope that someone else will pick up their garbage exposed by these unnamed killers. That never works, and your guilt or shame in front of your neighbors will have you hands and knees in your work suit trying to pick up those small pieces of trash that might say the wrong thing about you.

No. Not today. They are still out there at attention and quiet. Waiting to be chopsticked up and poured into the mouth of a waste truck.

I hear a car in the distance, wind pushed ahead by chrome, rubber with treads that grab asphalt and spin into song, slowing—the whirl of what sounds like an overdue tire alignment. Then “thud!” A moment of pause, and “whirrrllllll.” It goes off again, tires gripping, momentum grooved into submission to stay the path. Ms. Smith’s LA Times in plastic three feet from her door.

I once took over the newspaper route for Steve Imlay in fourth grade. He had thirty people to deliver to on Saturday and he was going on summer vacation. I agreed, and after he showed me the route once, I thought I’d remember.

There were complaints that next day. Papers missing, others placed at end of drives when they were required front door assistance. Steve called from a pay phone in Mammoth. He had checked in with his grandma, and she said some said, that they said, they never—was the story.

No Google Maps or Ubers for assistance. A Thomas Guide, well that only told me the street but it was in the numbers that things got all fouled up.
My Schwinn Stingray with banana seat and fat rear tire couldn’t do it, or just didn’t do it the way Steve did every Saturday.

A lesson learned in doing favors. Delivery, how nice people turn ugly when they don’t get their way, and the many more lessons I didn’t learn at the tender age of ten, the summer of ’78.

But my mind loses itself in the whirl of another vehicle. The sound isn’t gears ground with tar and oil and diesel explosions behind cylinder walls, pistons for horses, moving tonnage to do what needs to be done. No, this is the whirling like the tires, something electric. A Prius? Maybe Hybrid—for sure. Teslas don’t come this side of town. Must be an Amazon delivery. A world where the Bezos billionaires have taken the jobs of boys on delivery bikes and first jobs.

The clock edges closer to showtime. The darkness fades to glimmers of light. Car headlights up and down with more consistency. My phone that cries every time I put it down. The microwave and green lights that watch you wherever you are in the kitchen. And the red dot glare of the TV that says it’s off, but always has you wondering if it really is.

I roll over and bury my face in the pillow, snuffing out sight, taste, hoping the pillow will dimple deep enough to cover my ears and take with it another sense, but it doesn’t. So I give up trying to kill myself with down feathers and memory foam, and roll to my back, throw flannel sheets off, and arm myself for the day.

“Good morning, America, how are you?
Don’t you know me? I’m your native son…”
—Arlo Guthrie, still riding that City of New Orleans train through my head at 3 a.m.

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