Little Epiphanies at 5:20 AM

Thoughts on the Transformative Impact of Music

It’s the same every morning. I wake at 5:20 a.m. and lie beside my sleeping wife and listen to the monotonous stream of semi-trucks on I-40 two blocks away. Unable to fall back asleep, I rise, dress silently in the dark, and open the door to the kind of cold that makes you want to crawl up into your wool hat.

There is no reason to be up so early. I haven’t heard a peep from any of my editors for two months. Somehow I’ve fallen off everyone’s radar, and I can’t seem to compose a single email that doesn’t have the pong of desperation.

I exit the yard through a gate that empties me into the alley. A squirrel, carrying half a burger bun in its mouth, hurries along an electrical wire above me. I step past dumpster bin lids concave with frozen rainwater and I head west. Even in the darkness, the high bare trees are alive with birdsong.

I’ve never felt as useless or as irrelevant in my life. All I can think about is how much I need an income source soon, even if only to save me from the sidelong glances of disappointment I catch my wife giving me whenever our solvency is in question. I try to visualize myself stocking shelves at the nearby Dollar General. Obviously they need more staff. Their shelves are often emptier than the last morning of a Going Out Of Business sale.

With numb fingers, I find Gustavo Santãolalla’s Qhapaq Ñan on my iPhone. I tuck my staticky old ear plugs under my hat and into my ears and then slip the device into the chest pocket of my flannel jacket.

Haunting, ancient-sounding melodies begin to pass from my phone into my groggy brain. Gustavo’s recordings sometimes feel as if an unseen microphone has captured him late at night, playing only for himself. It is raw, lonesome-sounding music that often hangs in the air like a threat.

I roam, mile after mile, through the back alleys of Nashville’s Nations neighborhood. Puddles reflect icy gasoline rainbows. Recycling bins overflow with broken down Costco boxes from new 75” televisions. This alley, like alleys everywhere, is a place of ingress and egress, of function rather than form, like a mud room. When spring finally comes, with its tufts of dandelion and chickweed, the alley will somehow attain an incidental prettiness. But only just.

For three days, I’ve walked past a discarded coffee table in front of an L-shaped brick complex rented by multiple Mexican families. Assuming the table to be either irreparable or too cheap to salvage, I haven’t given it a second thought. After all, if the famously resourceful Mexicans consider an old coffee table chuck-worthy, it probably is. I remove one glove and pass my hand over the scarred dark wood surface, where some kid has stuck a half dozen Dole Banana stickers. There’s something in this wobbly, ruined table that speaks to me. I wrestle it over my upper back, lug it home, and set it up in the garage. And then I stare at it.

I find track three of Qhapaq Ñan and push the two white bars next to the title. “Gestando,” in English, means brewing or developing or, sometimes, gestating. The song builds, and then seemingly collapses, and then starts up again with a different feel.

If I have to reinvent myself, where do I begin? What am I? What do I do? Cracking open two hard plastic sawhorses, I slam them in place a little more roughly than necessary.

I step back into the garage to grab my Sears Craftsman handheld belt sander and an orange extension cord off the shelf. Plugged in and turned on, the sander fires up without hesitation. I move the tool in circles across the damaged glossy surface, gently blowing away the fine sawdust until a creamy patina reveals itself. Although I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing, I’m proceeding with the idea of artfully distressing the table. Wrecking shit has always come naturally to me.

The smell that rises up from cut or sanded wood, almost any wood, is a miracle. It’s been trapped inside the wood for decades and decades, sometimes even centuries. What I’m smelling is something that no longer exists. It’s an aromatic fossil. I lower my face to the table, close my eyes, and I breathe in.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with tools and mechanical processes my whole life. I’m not good with my hands. It’s something of a family in-joke, at my expense. When my grandfather was dying of cancer, my siblings and younger cousin Paul were visiting him at the hospital. Since my grandfather was attached to a morphine IV drip that he could activate automatically with the press of a button, he drifted in and out of the conversation. In one such lull, Paul inquired what kind of engine my newly-acquired 1967 Plymouth Valiant had.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” my grandfather suddenly muttered, through cracked lips. “He has no idea.” Then he pushed his morphine button and fell back asleep.

Those were the last words my grandfather, after whom I was named, ever spoke to me.

I suppose a normal, well-adjusted human being would have simply smiled, kissed his dying grandpa on the forehead, walked away, and eventually forgotten that the conversation ever happened. But I have not. I, apparently, have something to prove to someone who has been gone for almost 35 years and who was only trying to enjoy being a smartass while he still could.

Santãolalla’s “Alma” begins, and with it comes an ancient, precise sadness. I can’t bring myself to work while it plays, so I open a burgundy canvas folding chair and drop into it. My mind goes blank. For a person who spends most of his time in his own head, it’s not an unpleasant feeling.

I have no idea where hope hides all day long when I really need her, but in the silence following the last note of the song, she suddenly appears. And then, finding an unoccupied nook in my spirit, she curls up and makes herself at home. I punch in the automatic garage door code and watch as it rises. Inside the cluttered garage, I go from wall to wall, collecting all the extra tools I’ll need. As I step back out into the alley, the eastern sky brightens.

After laying out a dark blue, paint-splattered tarp, I tighten the table’s wobbly legs with an Allen key and then reattach the loose ½” X 3” slats along the lower shelf with finishing nails. Two slats are missing. Grabbing a crowbar, I step across the alley toward a discarded desk that’s been there for weeks and I disassemble a sliding drawer for the purpose of salvaging two 1” X 3” boards. With coarse sandpaper, I shave them down to a ½” and then coat both with a light green paint/primer.

“Aum” begins. It’s one of the album’s oddest tracks, a sound collage of bird calls, clicks, tapping noises and bowed strings. A gentle collision of elements, “Aum” feels like the musique concrete equivalent of what I’m trying to do to the discarded table. Back in the garage, I come across a flask-sized product called Restor-a-Finish, a mahogany-colored stain and solvent and I brush onto the table top. I snap a picture with my iPhone:

Lying in bed that night, wrapped in a gauze of weariness, hope returns. I can feel her rummaging around in my thoughts, sorting the contents of my brain into new categories: repaired and not yet repaired; restored and not yet restored. Repurposed and not yet repurposed.

Bent but not broken.

I’m wide awake the next morning at 5:20 a.m. and, again, I set out to scour the back lanes for tilting bookshelves, chairs with broken legs, and vanities degraded with cigarette burns. I’m on a scavenger’s quest for furniture whose inherent uselessness might someday prove to have been greatly exaggerated.

Just like my own.