You’ve come to love this time of day. This vague hour just before dawn they call Beedahbun in the old language. It means First Light.
Even now, after all the years and wild geographies that removed you from the influence of that talk, it seems to call you here, to this charcoal world where the colors and shapes of things begin to move, resettle, realign themselves, awaken. It’s always the quiet that draws you here, invites you to watch the air change around you. It’s like that.
It’s like the air gets filled, becoming mauve then orange easing into yellow until, at last, the color shifts, becoming birdsong, wind in the leaves and the soft swish of traffic from the street until everything, even you, are the hint of the glint of the light. You feel yourself become in it. The world and you shrugging yourselves alive together, a circle, thick and fat and whole as the sun slipping over the lip of the world.
He gave you that, those mornings of your childhood when he’d poke your feet with a spoon, a finger to the lips, a whisper to draw you into the conspiratorial silence of fishermen. It was always the fresco face of the water that gave you what you’ve come to understand as light, that sleek grayness, shimmering like a trout. And as the river lulled you there was no need for any kind of talk beyond it, this conversation of cast and wait, retrieve and shrug and cast again that tied you, joined you, gave you relationship, made you men.
It’s strange now to think that this Ukrainian man, this foster-father who’d wordlessly hand you warm perogies and coffee awakened talk in you, though then, words finned silently as waiting fish in your depths. He loved you. Something in the silence of those mornings told you that.
Something in the shared adoration of the coming of the light that rendered speech useless convinced you of it. And now, years dead, the cancer taking him too young, you realize that he fostered ‘father’ in you, all you know of it at least, and when you recall the hands, working man hands, mechanic’s hands, rife with grit and grease, oil and cigarette, rubbing your shoulders when your fish was landed, their scent, their feel, it’s all the lexicon you need to tell you that there was once a man to bring you to the world. That’s what it’s all about really, this business of fathers and sons, an introduction to the world, then a gentle push between the shoulder blades that tells you can land the biggest fish alone, pull it from the river’s grasp and celebrate it in the light of another morning.
Some people sit in you like a time of day, and their absence displaces you, a part you in shadow always.
