Tony woke early.  He didn’t have any real reason to get up while it was still dark, but he did.  He didn’t have an 8 to 8 job working at some meaningless corporation, pushing some meaningless cog from one cubical to the next.  No, he was free from that insanity.

 

He liked to walk.  That was the reason why he got up early.  Every morning he’d get up, put on his sweats and steal out into the brisk morning air.   He’d walk for a few miles in no particular direction, with no particular hurry.  Oh sure he saw those girls that thought themselves fat walking at a good clip, but he wasn’t one of them.  Nor was he sure he even understood them.  He couldn’t remember ever seeing one that was actually fat and by fat he was balancing it against Tommy from elementary school…now that kid was fat. 

 

So when Tony would take his walks he didn’t much care for looking at the people running around him like busy ants.  Everyone seemed in such a hurry now a day.  Running from something.  Maybe they were afraid of death?  Tony wasn’t sure.  But that was okay with him, because he also understood that he wasn’t that smart.

 

He reflected on learning about his stupidity now as the cool morning air swept into his face and he pulled his own apartment door shut behind him.  It must have been a lifetime ago, but he was sure that someone had told him that he was stupid or an idiot at some point in his life.  Sure his father had said it, but he was kidding about it, right?  Fathers did that sort of thing, didn’t they?  Tony couldn’t be sure, but it sure felt like something fathers did.  No, it had been someone with authority; someone that even daddy had to listen to.  Someone like his teacher.  But he couldn’t really remember that, it had been so very long ago.

 

Tony decided to walk toward the park this morning.  Far off he could hear the hum of the freeway, already whizzing right along at 5:00am in the morning.  Busy little things we are aren’t we, Tony thought as he looked up into the night sky.  He could see the trailing edge of Orion as it set in the morning sky.  He suddenly wondered if in the future people would be in a hurry to get in their spaceships and blast off into oblivion.  He was sure that he wouldn’t.  In fact he would have liked it if there was simply a stairway leading out there…something he could walk.

 

Mrs. Johnson passed him with her dog.  It was a big dog.  Some kind of Dane.  What had she called it?  Gray?  Oh, no, Tony, it’s a Great Dane, you moron, but…but what?  He couldn’t get around it.  Some kind of big colored dog!

 

He watched her be drug by that dog and thought that some day that dog’s going to decide it doesn’t like her and drag her and her life into the back end of a bus.  He giggled at the cartoon lifestyle people should have and kept to his walk. 

 

He walked all the way to the park, walked through the sand where the kids would play later, and walked along the path out into another neighborhood.  He walked through the dark not expecting anything.  He walked like time had forgotten him and left him festooned on some desolate island, like some jewel bedazzled on the tip of some ancient volcano…over looking all.  Seeing everything.

 

Tony was good at this observation about time.  He may have been slow about everything in the world, but he understood the nature of time.  And who better not to?  For Einstein said that time was relative, didn’t he?  And maybe that was the secret that Tony had over his neighbors climbing into their aluminum caskets every morning for places no one wanted to go.  Maybe Tony’s moronic disposition was a gift from on high…a way to recognize the marbles of time as they dance through the dust.

 

Tony could barely remember the name Einstein, let alone the idea of time, but he was sure, like fog in the fall, that something was good about the witness of time.  Something right and pure about being steady and set in the face of it.  Something true about walking each step into the battle.

 

He was sure about that.