Middle Age Before Sunrise

There was no haze in the morning. There were no places to hide. The streets were of a city where the homeless had found a home. The garbage bags full of the restaurants’ leftovers gashed large holes from stray cats and rats. A few still drunken sailors were singing “Take me to the ballpark”. The last baseball game was days ago, but for them time was negotiable. Just like a place to sleep, try sex, and then a clean shave before leaving again for the vast spaces of the ocean.

The cool smell of wet concrete makes my morning walks comfortable. The narrow alleys, the last cigarette smoked by the ladies of the night before they call it a day, the leaking transmission fluid from diesel trucks, all build into a familiar olfactile identity. I can close my eyes and walk the streets just by holding the leash. My dog goes where he wants and I just follow. Before sunrise, trust is the only guide.

The harbor has secrets we all know about. It is where someone held the hand of another who did not want to be cuddled; it is where a young man discovered women; it is where an old man forgot about women; and it is the desolate land where beggars with missing teeth and cornrow hair ask for money to eat. Those who reach for their pockets know it is for beer, that it is for cheap Vodka, or that it is for a syringe in the tortured vein. But they still give, hoping that they are wrong.

The sailboats rattle softly with the breeze and the waves. They provide the background melody to my walk and the snoring city. An ambulance breaks the calm, then fades away. Someone got help; someone may make it for another day.

I hear the cough of a worker carrying his coffee canister and inhaling a self-rolled cigarette. I open my eyes to see the sky become obvious, brighter, and promising a new day. The car traffic shades away the smell of garbage and wet shelters from dreams that turn painful at sunrise. My dog has now checked the urine marks of every other city dog, and is ready for returning home to breakfast and long hours of sleeping on the balcony. I am too, almost for the same reasons.

And when we get home, we often look at each other as if to say “Which one of us was at the end of the leash?”

September 23, 2012

©Vahé Kazandjian, 2013