Robert Petitt
April 17, 2005
Musings of a Late Night Security Guard
Today marks the first time I am working the wee-hour
shift in about twenty years. This of course does not include the countless
times my pager summoned me back to my day job at 3 a.m.; this is the real deal
-- the shift that disrupts one’s sleeping patterns for days in either
direction, one that begins when most people go to sleep and ends when they
awake. This is the time of night that even Nature sleeps. It is indeed an hour
of supposed peace and tranquility, a time one associated with the old TV test
pattern; of hospital emergency rooms that never cease serving customers; of
janitors who wield their trustworthy mops, restoring order to what the rest of
us spent the other sixteen hours of the day trampling under foot. This is the
graveyard shift, and it is now twenty minutes into the second hour of the new
day.
The radio sitting next to my desk is tuned to the
local AM powerhouse radio station over which emanates what one hopes is
interesting talk. The chatter is intended to help me to avoid joining the ranks
of most normal people I know and meeting them somewhere in dreamland. I dare
not think of my pillow at this ungodly hour lest I lose my wakeful momentum and
surrender to the most basic of human functions and doze off. On this first day
of my new shift, I cannot imagine how I will not succumb to the temptation to
close my eyes and do that which seems so natural. I turn up the radio’s volume,
open the window a little wider to let the cool air in, and press on.
The complexion of all of humanity can be seen to take
on a different hue during the hours shortly after midnight: Sound carries much
farther in the quiet, evidence of which is heard in the distant train’s whistle
otherwise obliterated by ambient daytime bustle; street lights cast an orange
pall onto the streets they serve as well as onto the cars beneath them; lights
of the city reflect off of overcast skies and then back to the ground,
providing a light nearly bright enough to be useful; crickets and frogs sing
tunes only they understand; moths and other small insects perform what appears
to us to be a senseless dance,
frenetically orbiting any stationary light to the exclusion of anything I would
deem to be productive, spending an enormous amount of energy and annoying me in
the process.
Now four o’clock and with nearly two hours of darkness
remaining, I notice that dew has formed on objects outside my guard shack. An
unsung hero, dew is indeed an amazing concept, one which scarcely is noticed
outside the realm of the graveyard shift. Its presence is an indication that
the air temperature has fallen to a point where it can no longer hold moisture
as water vapor. Available freely but not
without condition, dew silently provides a modicum of water to plants, flowers,
grass, and anything else that happens to cool sufficiently. Having met all the
necessary conditions for the arrival of the mysterious substance, my truck,
which is parked nearby, glistens, unaware of the underlying physics.
Breaking the silence is a new sound which I briefly struggle
to identify: “thump, thump, thump” punctuates the early morning calm. Growing
louder as it nears me, I see newspapers, flung from an
old sedan like massive Frisbees, coming to rest on driveways, on bushes, and in
planter boxes. I wave to the passing driver in a gesture of fleeting kinship,
feeling perhaps a glimpse of camaraderie. Fellow soldier of the early morning,
he does not respond; rather he continues his slow march along the only side
street in my view. Moments later, he makes a sweeping left turn and vanishes. I
feel a pang of sorrow as I realize I am once again alone, an emotion I quickly
stifle as I understand the silliness of it.
I never enjoyed the treat of having milk delivered to
my boyhood home in glass bottles; for this I have always felt deprived. In my
first eighteen years, I estimate that I probably consumed more than 2,000
gallons of the fabulous liquid: some without fat, some with chocolate syrup
added, some mixed with cereal, nearly all of it ice cold. What a strange sense
of loss I have as the passing dairy truck stops briefly on “my” street. Moments
later, it is once again quiet.
Much like the period of totality during a solar
eclipse, I am aware that the new day is very nearly upon me. Across town,
shielded within the frames of countless homes, coffee brews, alarm clocks rage,
showers are alive with steam, radios shout at no one in particular. As the
first inkling of daylight becomes faintly discernible, as if on cue, I hear the
first songbird… now a second, followed by a third. It is now 5:45 a.m., and the
slowly increasing sunlight portends the raucousness and chaos of the impending
day.
I know I will somehow need to find refuge from the busyness
that will soon engulf me so that I might recuperate from the havoc the past
several hours has done to my circadian rhythm, a havoc paradoxically wrought
during the nearly blissful peace of my night’s work. Sleep will be good.