People of The Wee Hours
I always liked the early morning hours. A lot of my childhood was spent staying up all night, and then hearing the blackbirds stirring and, eventually, sensing the changing light of dawn. Thoreau wrote that he noticed a smooth rush of wind every morning at around 4:am, and I discovered this, two. I estimated that this wind was a result of expanding air pushing in from the newly warming East. It always signals the end of the last day and the beginning of the new.
Tonight, I dreamt I was up between dawn and the time the children go off to school. This is a very safe, quiet time. The all-nighters are too tired to cause trouble, and the newly-awakened are too buried in their determined optimism, all they want is an easy go at it. I think this is the supreme time of libertarianism, where everyone is civil, but basically prefers to be left alone. Building foundations of a new day. In my dream, large motor-homes and converted school buses where silently roaming about, around corners, into and out of drives, down the empty streets. This was there time. I figured it was easier for them to move those great bulks at this time, when there was less traffic.
It was a delightful, scattered parade of individual homes on wheels, with long antennae and jimmied exteriors. A whole different world appearing out of nowhere for an hour or two, and then covered over by everyone else's wider, more normal day. Shadow lives, like so many of the rural poor, or free spirits, who don't show up in polls or anywhere else. Except in this twilight time of dreams.
As I walk along the tracks, I pass a long, low-lying area behind the trees, and next to the river. There is a, "no trespassing," sign at the gravel entrance. I see motor-homes and campers down there, on land too low and flood-prone for houses. There are people living down there, too independent or outcast or poor for even mobile home parks. They are, to everyone else, ghosts, as thin as shadows. Time, trains and I pass by, like day and night, and thousands of suns, and song birds that live and die almost instantaneously. But the people down there, almost hermetically sealed, live on in a world of their own, divorced from time, paused, and almost eternal, in a fog, like Brigadoon. Maybe such fancy magic can be derived from their plight, like stardust from stone, when all they are are poor and forgotten.
Pieces of you and me, left behind in the morning.
Tonight, I dreamt I was up between dawn and the time the children go off to school. This is a very safe, quiet time. The all-nighters are too tired to cause trouble, and the newly-awakened are too buried in their determined optimism, all they want is an easy go at it. I think this is the supreme time of libertarianism, where everyone is civil, but basically prefers to be left alone. Building foundations of a new day. In my dream, large motor-homes and converted school buses where silently roaming about, around corners, into and out of drives, down the empty streets. This was there time. I figured it was easier for them to move those great bulks at this time, when there was less traffic.
It was a delightful, scattered parade of individual homes on wheels, with long antennae and jimmied exteriors. A whole different world appearing out of nowhere for an hour or two, and then covered over by everyone else's wider, more normal day. Shadow lives, like so many of the rural poor, or free spirits, who don't show up in polls or anywhere else. Except in this twilight time of dreams.
As I walk along the tracks, I pass a long, low-lying area behind the trees, and next to the river. There is a, "no trespassing," sign at the gravel entrance. I see motor-homes and campers down there, on land too low and flood-prone for houses. There are people living down there, too independent or outcast or poor for even mobile home parks. They are, to everyone else, ghosts, as thin as shadows. Time, trains and I pass by, like day and night, and thousands of suns, and song birds that live and die almost instantaneously. But the people down there, almost hermetically sealed, live on in a world of their own, divorced from time, paused, and almost eternal, in a fog, like Brigadoon. Maybe such fancy magic can be derived from their plight, like stardust from stone, when all they are are poor and forgotten.
Pieces of you and me, left behind in the morning.