#65 Before Dawn

A motivational speaker, stopping for the night at a motel halfway back home, wakes up before dawn without the slightest feeling of tiredness. What does he do? He goes for a walk. Happy reading!

To pair the main course of Before Dawn is a fine wine for your ears. This week, it’s The Offline’s L’eau.

If you’re overcooked from the sun of this piece, take a dip in the pool of the archives.

For books by other writers, click here.

#54 Before Dawn

The first thing to pierce my consciousness was birdsong. Though ‘song’ is generous. It wasn’t a trilling, a beautiful lilt, or a satisfying cadence, but a series of long, shrill monotones like a desperate communication in Morse. I thought it was a whistle before my brain kicked into gear.

My eyes opened. Soft, cloudy light dropped into my room like dry ice from beneath the curtains. As I remembered where I was - a small town half way between the conference I was speaking at in Philadelphia and my home in Pittsburgh - I became aware that I wasn’t tired at all. What hit me first was a thought, a question: if I’m not tired, then what the hell time is it? Expecting to discover that I’d overslept, I was surprised to learn, courtesy of the big red lights of the alarm clock, that it had just passed 5 o’clock in the morning. Naturally, I rolled back over, facing away from the window, and closed my eyes again. After all, nobody needs to be up at that time. My body knows what it’s doing. It’ll go to sleep again.

But it didn’t. I didn’t. I just lay there, thinking about how I couldn’t sleep. How I should be sleeping but can’t. So, as you do when you’re lying awake at a time you shouldn’t, I started thinking about things. Big things. This conference I was at in Philly, I was speaking to two hundred doctors in training, getting them psyched about the lives they had ahead of them, reminding them of their duty to the public, their patients, and their service for their country. No different than the service I gave for my country, for twenty years in the Middle East. What struck me, what I couldn’t get out of my head, is how young they all looked. How young they all were. After all, most of them were in their early twenties. And I lay there in my sixties, with back ache, scars, irreversible signs of aging. And how trite it may seem, but I just felt tired with it all. Another conference, another long drive somewhere, a hundred questions of: what was it like? Have you shot anyone? What’s the worst thing you’ve seen?

Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!

Those damn birds would not stop!

I flung the duvet off of me, opened the curtains and looked out for those birds. As I did, their eeking stopped, but there were no birds to be seen. Dim light revealed the stillest car park, the empty road opposite my window, the thicket of trees whose leaves wobbled in the light Pennsylvania breeze. As I watched and waited, a calm came over me, arresting the frustration that previously gripped me, and the sun poked out from behind a thick cloud, and a stream of light flooded the windscreen of a pickup Toyota in the car park, and reflected up onto me in my first-floor motel room window.

For what reason I cannot tell you, I put on my pants and shirt, slipped on my trainers, and stepped outside. The air was biting breeze, but in the light it was warm enough. I climbed down the steps into the car park, reached the road, and made the five minute walk into the morning-quiet of the town. A bus passed at the crossroads, but beyond that, there was genuinely no evidence of human life at all. The houses were still, lights off, imposing themselves on the thickets of grass and clicking crickets around them. Cars perspired with condensation, shop windows restricted your view with their aggressive shutters. Crows squawked and watched me as I made my way.

I reached a bus stop with a sign showing a timetable of thirty or forty different stops it would make, starting in approximately - I checked my watch - one hour and twenty two minutes. It reminded me of the bus I rode to school when I was a boy, and the time I flung chewing gum across the bus and it landed in a girl’s hair. The bus driver screamed at everyone, demanding that whoever the culprit was owned up, but no one seemed to have seen me do it, and I kept my mouth shut and looked at the floor and no one said anything to me about it. I felt guilty at the time. I never meant for that girl to have a chunk of her hair cut out. I actually quite liked her. But I didn’t feel guilty enough to own up to it.

As stupid as it sounds, being a motivational speaker for talented youngsters can actually be pretty demotivating for oneself. Perhaps it’s not the same for others, but for me, I prefer to be in the action, doing the doing. That probably won’t surprise you given my career. So trying to motivate others to do the doing, well, it’s less satisfying. It’s like that thing I read in a book once: do you wanna be the Michelangelo creating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or the critic on his high horse who gets to write about it? Anybody can do the latter. Anybody can say a few words to inspire a few doctors or whatever, but only real talent can save a life in surgery when all hope’s gone.

I walked on a little further to where a little general store stood. Not the kind run by some big corporate body, a 7 Eleven or whatever, but the kind you know has been here for generations. The sign read Milroy & Sons General Store in faded cream paint on a red board. Outside the store was a little bench, perhaps for customers, a place for the elderly to rest before they lug their shopping home, a place for the local couple to tie their dog up while they shop. I took a seat and inspected the store. It reminded me of my father’s store, not a general store but a hardware store. He inherited the building from his father and ran his store out of it for 42 years. But when he retired, he didn’t have a real pension to look after himself, so he sold the store and lived off the cash. Enough to keep him fed and a roof over his head, not enough to really enjoy himself. When I thought back about my father, and his life, I like the idea of him going to the same store at the same time everyday, opening his shutters, opening the door, flipping his closed sign to open, and going about his day. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything more boring. All I wanted when I was young was to see action like you see in the movies, like what I heard about from the news. But now I do these speaking opportunities, I actually envy the routine of it all. At least he didn’t have to go driving around state to state, sleeping in shitty motels.

My father’s been gone for some time now. Cancer. He didn’t go without a fight, though. Of course he didn’t. He beat it three times before it finally got him. The stubbornest of old bastards. I could hear his voice then, like he was sitting on that bench next to me, saying, ‘Stop whining you sonnova bitch. You don’t even know you good you got it. A beautiful wife and family, a big house with a long enough drive to fit a few cars on, the luxury of driving around all day, seeing this beautiful world… Go and see this beautiful world.’

Without really being aware, I reached up and wiped the tears from my cheeks. Their cold touch brought me back into the moment. I looked around and the town was so still, as though everything was two-dimensional, plastic, fake, like a film set waiting to be deconstructed, or blown over in a light wind. The clouds drift apart, and a blue sky emerged with a bright, rising sun at its centre. Something about that sun, on that day, in that ghost town, had a power to shift my feeling entirely. A deep breath later, a cool hand running through my hair, I felt a renewed sense of gratitude for life, for this random, lovely, prosaic town I found myself in, and my father’s words ringing in my ears: ‘Go and see this beautiful world…’