afterthoughts: the h-1 lullaby
TRANSCRIPT
8/7/2019 Afterthoughts: The H-1 Lullaby
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152 march 2009 www.onolulugzine.o
afterthoughts
I
i live overlooking—or, more accurately, over-listening—
the H-1. Our apartment is perched high enough that the reeway
isn’t a noisy nuisance; it’s just a background shuush sound, not
unlike the ocean. An urban sur.
My vantage point over this asphalt ebb and ow makes
me an excellent amateur trac reporter. I can tell when rushhour is particularly bad, or i
the raging car re tying up
westbound trac has been
extinguished.
But with the birth o my
daughter, the H-1 has be-
come a trusted companion.
No matter how ungodly the
hour, there’s motion on the
H-1. Taillights glow red in
one direction; in the other,
headlights are a squinty,
golden bright. This streamo cars is a comorting
assurance that I am not, in
act, the sole human awake.
Where y’all going at 3:17
a.m., by the way? To work, to
sh, to party, I suppose. To
7-Eleven and Hungry Lion.
Our amily sleeps in
Venn diagrams these days:
One adult at a time clings
joyully to a pillow, rarely
intersecting with both a
sleeping baby and a spouse.
During my shit, I linger
at the window, counting
the vehicles as they pass
through the night, and inhale
the breeze coming down of the mountains. The middle o
the night smells green, like erns and leaves. The air is almost
tangible, a mossy velvet.
Shuush, says the green wind.
Orange city lights dot the dark hillside along the H-1. It
looks as i a constellation came home late one night, emptied its
pockets o loose stars and stumbled of to bed. They lie scat-
tered, these pretender stars, creating a glow perectly illuminat-
ing my laps around the living room. I pace, jiggling 12 pounds
o swaddled, heavy-lidded baby. She’s contemplating dozing
of—seeming suspicious o rest despite her obvious atigue.
Shuush, I say to her.
I attempt a lullaby, but I’m araid that, at this hour, I can
conjure one song and one song only: “Lola,” by the Kinks. “Well,I’m not dumb but I can’t un-
derstand/Why she walked
like a woman and talked
like a man …”
I can tell when my
daughter is alling asleep
because she starts to
instinctively smile, a REM
cycle going through her
little brain. And then, i I’m
really lucky, she will laugh.
Not a giggle, but a deep,
almost masculine chortle.Heh-heh-heh. It’s like
she is dreaming o being a
Catskills comedian, circa
1957.
Or maybe she’s laugh-
ing because she just got the
punch line o “Lola.”
It’s 5:06 a.m. The H-1
grows busier, the cars more
evenly spaced. Through the
window, I see my neigh-
bor’s shadow sipping cofee.
I hear trash trucks belowthe apartment, clattering
as they back up. I think o
the sleep I’m missing, and
the bags that are going to be
under my eyes, and the 9 a.m. meeting I need to attend.
“Shuush,” I say to mysel. Soon enough this baby will sleep
through the night, then be too big to cradle in one arm, then be
too big to carry at all.
So I savor the night and the tiny girl who laughs in her sleep.
I listen to the sur o cars on the H-1.
Shuush.
BY KATHRYN DRURY WAGNER
executive editor
i l l u s t r a t i o n : j i n g j
i n g t
s o n g . p h o t o : l i n n y
m o r r i s
The H-1 LullabySteering my way through the night.