A Pilgrim’s Digression

It’s early morning in the big city. The homeless man sleeps under his blanket on a bench in Stanton Park, still and quiet as a small child. The newspaper delivery man throws a bundle of freshly inked papers in the doorway of the Trover bookshop. Gunpowder blue light suffuses the upper facades of the east-facing buildings; at street level, it is still night.

Broke: that feeling you get at the end of the month when the bills have been paid, and you stand in the middle of the two-week chasm between paychecks and wonder why you haven’t got two nickels in your pocket. Did you overspend? Did you have some unexpected, but necessary expenses?

It’s not a “can’t make my mortgage” broke feeling; not at all. It’s more a “no Starbucks this week” broke kind of feeling. Walking down the street, past the bookshop, past the Starbucks, you check your wallet again, as if those two bucks that have been haunting its folds for the past three days will have somehow metastisized into a ten dollar bill, or even a five. Heck, a five would do.

A person can buy a good cup of coffee and a croissant with a five.

As you pass Pete’s Diner, where you usually have breakfast on Thursday, you look inside. The fat, white tee-shirted, white-haired fry cook is tossing hashbrowns on the griddle. The eyes in his baggy, bassett-hound face never look up from his flashing spatula, even as the little Asian woman who runs the place yells at him soundlessly. The waitress pouring coffee looks out the window and sees you looking in; you look away guiltily.

Broke. Part of it is the end of the month, part of it is gas prices. Ten dollars buys you not even three gallons of regular. Twenty will raise your tank only to about three quarters full. Plan on spending at least thirty if you want to fill ‘er up.

Broke. Why did you spend twenty-two dollars at the iTunes Music Store last week? Well, it always seems like you have a lot of money in the bank when the direct deposit first comes in, doesn’t it? And twenty-two dollars wouldn’t have made much of a difference. How about if you hadn’t had to pay $360.00 in student loans? Now that would have made a difference in your bank book.

You arrive at work and ride the elevator up to the fifth floor. You turn on the lights and drop your bag at your desk. You take your coffee mug to the water cooler and draw a cup of H2O. Microwave the water, three minutes on high. Drop in a teabag, Twinings English Breakfast. You peal open a Pop Tart package, brown sugar and cinammon, and begin eating them cold as the tea steeps.

You think to yourself, “Boy, some eggs, bacon, and potatoes sure would have tasted fine this morning.”  Broke.

You plug in your earbuds and turn the clickwheel on your iPod to a bootleg MP3 of this new radio program you’ve been listening to.

Welcome to Theme Time Radio Hour, Dreams, Schemes, and Themes, with your host Bob Dylan. Today’s theme is “Broke,” and we begin with an old standard by Lefty Frizzell. He wants to go honky tonkin’, hit all the night spots, dance, drink beer and wine. But he’s broke. “If you got the money, Honey, I got the time.”

Bring along your cadillac, leave my old wreck behind. And if you run short of money, I’ll run short of time. So says Lefty, and amen. We all could use a Money Honey, as Elvis called her.

Lacking that, there’s always work. Which is where you find yourself at 6:30 AM. Time to punch the clock and earn that paycheck. Next week you won’t be so broke, you tell yourself reassuringly. You’re almost to the top of the hill, you’re out of the canyon and with the pastures of plenty already within sight. You won’t be broke for long, at least until the end of next month.