On the First Shift

The bin men were already done when I came around the corner this morning. The truck pulling away at the far end of the lane, the bins set back at uneven intervals — the men who had handled them gone. There is a half of the day that finishes before the rest of us are awake, and the men who run it are a different species from the day-walkers; they do not look at you when you pass, they have already used what most of us think of as morning, and theirs ended in the dark.

I noticed the 7-Eleven the same way. The shutter half up, the door propped with an empty crate, a girl behind the counter doing the inventory she would not be doing if anyone had come in yet. She did not look up. The work of the early half is a particular tonality of work — efficient, untheatrical, indifferent to spectators. The whole point is that no one is watching, and the workers know it, and the not-being-watched is what frees the hands.

I think about them more often than I used to. There is a man at the bus stop who reads a paper folded in quarters — not skimming, reading; the way you read when the rest of your day has already been physical and you want one small quiet portion for the head before you go home and sleep through the time the rest of us call the working day. He is going home, not arriving. His evening will be when I am writing this thought.

It is not romance and it is not a lesson; I am not building toward something the world should learn from him. I am just a man who has woken before light enough times to know what that hour looks like, and I notice it on other men's faces when they have been in it longer than I have. There is something honest in it — the day does not owe them a clean morning, and they do not pretend that it does. The work is done already; the bin on the curb, the paper folded, the girl counting — and the rest of us walking around in the half of the day that is left over.