Hour

I think a real farmer wakes at four thirty, five at the latest. This is when the dew still drips. This is when the birds still cozy up under their mother’s butt. This is when worms flirt with driveways and do not yet know the dangers of the sun. I seem to be stuck waking at six and wonder what this makes me. I know that I need eight hours of sleep. I use no alarm clock. I let my body roll me, and nearly every morning it is an exact eight hours and four minutes. Or seven hours and fifty minutes. Or even eight hours and twenty-two minutes. My sleep is always within a half hour of eight.

The chickens stopped waking me when I lived in the 9th Ward. They became backdrop, like sirens and gunshots and the lifting of the bridge. And those chickens, they had no respect for time. And whatever came for those chickens in the middle of the night, they sure must have been surprised by the noise that could have woken a lesser man than me.

We saw Willie yesterday, and he looked skinnier. He wore a back brace. He didn’t have his little dog by his side. I saw a few others I had never seen. A white girl holding a cup of coffee. A red car with stickers of bands I did not recognize and a Ski Vail sticker that I did. When you’re in a place day after day, you don’t readily know how it’s changing. It takes perspective. It takes going away. It’s why Hemingway left Michigan. Why he left Toronto.

Maybe Arabi is my Paris. And when I wake at six I wonder who might be my Gertrude Stein. Who might tell me to take what I want to say and condense this? To say more with less words. This might be the journey. This might be what those farmers get from five to six in the morning. This might be what I am missing.

Nasim told me that Andrew Huberman told her to look at the sun in the morning and that if she did she would fall asleep sixteen hours later. I’m pretty quick with math. I’m pretty quick to take five to five equals twelve and four hours later is nine, but there is no sun at five.

What to do upon rising in the darkness? What to do when eight hours is a dream, when the man you want to become lives hidden in an hour when you are not awake. Surrender happens. In some moment you become able to sit and see all as all. Not this or that. Not invasive or opportunistic. Rather what is happening, what is. Existence does not need a belief.

So I’m an hour late in my ways of observation and I have a chestnut tree that drops its leaves and has never given nuts. Still I wonder. Still I lie open to the possibility, having just seen the long light green flowers last year. There is hope. Having known apples in New Orleans in June, I know that anything is possible. We can mix seasons. So that with harsh winters these fruits, the chestnut, maybe even my quince will deliver blessings.

And the other winters, when New Orleans does what I think she will do more of, spend an entire year without freezing, all of what I have planted will produce fruit and I will take the seeds of guava and eugenia and plinia and watch these become more plants and watch these plants spread and know that long after I am dead there may be a tree somewhere in the French Quarter and every child will know this was once a bush that somebody shaped into a trunk and it first fruited back in 2022, right beside the word succinct. This guava did not need an explanation. This taste was something to be experienced.

And in this future there is Willie, older now, in a city that has become more of a rainforest, in a city with sidewalks of fruit, and there is still wonder whether his little dog lives, and there is the memory of him passing me when I still lived in the 9th Ward, and there is the memory of him asking if I had any of those green tomatoes so he could bread them and fry them up, and there is me being able to walk into the place I knew then, the place I knew day after day, moment after moment, and there, grab him eight or ten unripe tomatoes.