I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

It’s 4 a.m. local. Dark, relatively quiet (the freeway murmurs gently like a loved one, the birds are still asleep), as cool as it will be today.

On air, the all-night jazz program finishes with a flourish, the host signs off with tiny hints of pride and relief at another shift brought safely home, the handoff accomplished. There’s a beat, a moment of stillness quite distilled, and then,

“Good morning. A bomb in an Iraqi suburb has killed a dozen people.”

AAAaaagh. Steve Inskeep. The pleasant, detached new voice of NPR calmly recites the day’s headlines. Horrific, indifferent or just plain stupid, the stories like the voice roll on. It isn’t perky, thank goodness for small favors, but… vacuous. Slowing slightly around the corners of certain words, for reasons of enunciation, but never resonant with thought, or the feeling thought engenders, necessarily entails. I wonder how long it will be until I wake to that voice informing me of a terrorist nuke, a forestalled election, the next plague. I say a prayer, for all of us. Bob Edwards, out there in the dark asleep… thanks, man, you are missed and loved.