My Time of Day

My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone.

When the smell of the rainwashed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the streetlight lamp
Fills the gutter with gold

That's my time of day
My time of day
Any you're the only doll I've ever wanted to share it with me.

-Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls

Since she was born, Nora and I have been taking quite a few walks in the moonlight, especially during that liminal period--not quite midnight, not quite dawn--when both the human and animal worlds are operating on a skeleton crew. At first I was too foggy-headed to do anything but count the lights in buildings throughout our apartment complex. More often than not, the same rooms would be lit up every night, some of them with the familiar blue-white flicker denoting misspent youth. After I got tired of feeling morally superior to couch potatoes, I started to venture out to the main road to listen to the low roar of distant traffic. It reminded me of the summer between college semesters when I worked the dish pit at Red Robin. Sauntering home at two in the morning, still smelling of grease and bleach, I got a childish delight in walking the dividing line between lanes, all the motorists snug in their beds for another three or four hours.

You keep strange, sparse company when you walk around after midnight. This morning, at around 3am, a man pulled up in a truck and asked me where he could find a convenience store that was still open. I really had no idea. If New York is "the city that never sleeps," Elsewhere could be called "the city that sleeps"--at 8pm even downtown is barren and ghostly. Out here in the country, I've spotted the occasional black flap of a bat or pale hop of a wild hare, but to be honest I've had more close encounters in broad daylight. In the wooded railroad tracks behind our apartment I've startled hidden deer and stared down baby raccoons, but always in the bright contrast of mid-afternoon. Now, in the early hours of morning I hear the incessant twittering of nocturnal romantics, but it wasn't until yesterday that Nora and I met a frog the size of a plum, who moved only after I brushed his hind leg with a twig.

Your thoughts can be surprisingly clear when you walk in familiar surroundings removed of people. You see the same buildings and streets uncomplicated by their daily purposes--things temporarily without motive, things as they can only be at rest. I haven't had any life-changing epiphanies, but my thoughts flow without interruption and I sing softly in the open air. Years ago, when Ian was a baby, I walked him around the church across the street, belting out the wrong words to "Danny Boy." You don't have license to do these things without a fussy baby on your shoulder. Last week I was shuffling Nora around a strip mall when we crossed paths with a street sweeper and its driver. It was an hour before sunrise, light enough to see my pajamas and disheveled hair, but the question on the driver's lips faded when he saw little Nora in my arms. I wouldn't be up this early without a newborn to coddle. Thanks, doll.