The Divisions Of The Day

There is a quote by Henry David Thoreau, something to the effect that he always rose early in order to help the sun come up.

If you find yourself stymied, unable to recognize some gift of that odd serendipitous cross between something you have seen in your today’s world and some thing in some yesterday’s world that offers you yet one more chance to receive the gift of self-acceptance that some half forgotten event offered you back then, then you might try the following exercise:

According to Henry David Thoreau there is that time when the night gives way to day. That almost magical time when he believed that one day released the world to the care of the next day. And I believe that that may be true. Not being much of a morning person, I wouldn’t be able to verify that from my experience. Although I do remember some times from my childhood, when I was up to greet the dawn.

My parents had the custom of setting off on journeys before first light. So there was always the sense of the car driving into the next day—the dark giving way to low slanting rays of the bright morning sun burning the eyes. But, I was always in the back seat. Never in charge. The world whizzed by with no choice on my part.

Oh, there have been times when I have driven into the sunrise, or away from it. But those were the days when we drove through the night to cross half the content with a car full of sleeping children. And yes there was that sense of crossing some meridian that separated one day from the next—not that it ever occurred to me to pull the car over and stop for a moment to glory in that moment. Well, unlike Thoreau, I knew that if one of the kids woke up, it would be me that had to do something about it. And there was that fixed number of miles we had to make before sunset.

We were just too hell bent to reach some destination to take time and help the sun with the passage of a day. Here I recognize a fact about myself. I would have told you that I have not had time alone, but that is far from the case. I have chosen not to be in the moments of the time I have been alone. I have tended more to live in the future or the past and missed those quiet moments, that I had all to myself.

I do, however, know that there are other times when one day shifts to the next. I have watched the day go away and leave Red Fish Lake in Idaho to the night birds. I remember the night coming forward across the lake bringing a slight chill in its wake. The reds, oranges and purples of sunset giving way to the various indigos of night. The lapping of the lake against the dock suddenly changing its beat, turning up its volume ever so slightly. It was, I think an echo of the day moving off across the Lake Travis of my childhood. I missed that one, too, and am not yet ready to recreate it on paper. The events of that evening were delicate and illusive—hardly events at all.

When you work night shift at Brackenridge Hospital, you learn that the stroke of midnight does not hold true. That balancing point between yesterday and today does not happen at midnight. It happens at one o’clock. As you begin the one o’clock rounds, you become aware of a breeze moving down the hall to meet you. You walk down the white hall making every effort to keep your rubber-soled shoes quiet against the terrazzo floors as you move silently into each dark room. You keep the beam of your flash light on the floor in order not to wake any sleeping patient, offer patients who are awake a word of recognition or a sleeping potion. There is always that cool edge of tomorrow as it comes down the hall. There is an odd mechanical feel to the precise way it slices off yesterday, and brings with it the quickening energy of tomorrow.

If you are working on Second South and you look down the hall just at that moment, you will see a translucent white of figure float out of the door of 214, the one private room on that floor. The vapor will dissipate up near the high ceiling. It is probably The One Who Watches Over leaving the patient in that room to your care now that the risky cusp of the new day has passed. But it never hurts to check, again; the room is reserved for the ones who have been identified as being near enough to the knife edge between this life and the next to merit the privacy of that room. When you check the patient in that room after one o’clock there is never that swift movement in the shadows of that companion spirit moving out and away from your flashlight as you enter that room. From one ‘til seven you move cautiously into that room to check the IV and offer the half awake patient a cool drink of water. Alone, you the burden of care seems heavier burden seems heavier, somehow.