Early Sunday Morning

I used to mock my father and his chums for getting up early on Sunday morning and drinking coffee at a local spot but now I’m one of those chumps. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car. It’s like this: just when you think you have forgotten that red-haired girl who left you stranded in a parking lot forty years ago, you wake up early enough to see her disappearing around the corner of your dream on someone else’s motorcycle roaring onto the highway at sunrise. And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit café full of early morning risers where the windows are covered with soot and the coffee is warm and bitter.