The Uninteresting Life and Times of an Antisocial Violinist: Week 8.8: Episode in the Life of a Cacher

Early Sunday morning, the sky is dark when you get up and that’s how you know the year is sinking fast. There’s a sharp chill outside, the wind brisk and fresh, an ocean breeze channeling straight into the concrete canyon. The metro station’s closed, corrugated aluminum sealing the entrance, and you remember that on Sunday morning the trains like to sleep in and at six-thirty am it’s still the OWL bus lines that are running. So you poke around the intersection and introduce yourself to the N OWL stop, the N Judah-Ocean Beach-inbound, and you keep one eye over each shoulder because there’s a handful of skateboarders stomping out their turf, as it were, and hollering in deep voices to each other as if they were trying to display defiance or masculinity or swag or toughness or maybe something else, you’re not really sure, and anyway it doesn’t seem to make much sense because at this hour there isn’t even an audience for their displays except the cold grey buildings and cold grey sky, but maybe that’s the point, maybe if there was an audience they wouldn’t have the guts, and you can understand this because it’s how you feel every day in the practice room.

The bus isn’t silent when it comes but it might as well have been because there’s always an inner silence in that twilight hour before the dawn. You could talk as loud as you liked, you could laugh, sing, cry, but the sounds would be superficial and they would slide right off the roundness of silence (like water droplets from wax paper), and refuse to penetrate the grey air.

Turning south onto the Embarcadero, something bright hits you full on and knocks your breath onto the floor. There’s the flat, calm harbor, there’s the dazzling path the sunlight makes on its crinkled surface, there’s the newly-risen sun itself blazing through the suspension wires of the Bay Bridge and that’s so simple, nothing special about the sun coming up, except beauty. Such a patchwork world this is, when the rigor mortis of concrete is stitched up next to live water, when your view of the sky blossoming from grey to blue is framed in structures made for the glorification of wealth, when the pink-and-gold light washes over the filth and softens it.