Silver

They talk a lot about the full moon and the timing of government checks, but after many years of doing this I still can't predict with any reliability when they will come out and when they will stay put. 

Last night, I'd anticipated a busy one so positioned myself in a hotel parking lot not far from the hospital. I spent nine hours of an eight hour shift inside an insulated sweatshirt underneath a poncho liner drifting in and out of sleep reclined in my driver's seat. The river fog moved in and a hard frost silvered every surface. Twenty-five degrees. I started the car periodically, ran the heat, and played the radio. It was a local college station without a DJ, just someone's play list without interruption. Most every song was one I'd never heard before and the hotel parking looked stilled and filled with cars featuring license plates from other states making me remember, not very long ago, living in hotels and eating on an expense account. I felt some variety of loneliness there with the memories of those people and places now relegated to the past. No one came to the hospital in need of what I do. 

In the morning, I stopped into a diner on my way home. A young father - big as a bull - his slight wife and their three small children. He snarled at the little girl for unintentionally making contact with her plate of scrambled eggs with the sleeve of her coat. She goes still, stares, her body rigid. My own body knows that feeling, remembers, hates. I pay and leave. 

When it's time to go, there are many things so often repeated that I will be smiling wide to escape. The things I'll have trouble letting go of will be the things I never really knew.