the today show

every weekday, i take a morning walk with a bunch of the women i live with. i wake up at 4:55 for a 5 AM departure–just enough time to get dressed and put on my shoes. if i woke up even five minutes earlier, i think there would be time to convince myself to sleep instead of walk, which is, of course, exactly what i would do. but once i’m on the walk, i’m more or less glad to be moving and i start to wake up. as we go along, we gather little pieces of information about our neighborhood and our neighbors: who’s dumping their garbage into the stream that goes to the lake or who’s lighting theirs on fire; who’s drunk and strolling home at such a late (early) hour; who hasn’t cleaned the dog-doo off their stoop. last week, we saw the man who lives across the street kissing his next-door neighbor’s maid goodbye at five in the morning. the week before, we huddled around a hole where a lime sampling had been pulled up and stolen at some point in the night. and the week before that, we were only thirty-five minutes late to a minor crime scene and a pool of the perpetrator’s blood was spilled fresh on the sidewalk as proof. we see shirtless men in their house shoes and old women wearing thin nightgowns. we see bony dogs with pink skin, long tits and dried scabs. we see drug deals on the footbridge and tiny gorgeous children getting dressed for school. we see men squatting on corners with emptied bottles of rum and the light of television sets inside every home. we see tortillerias opening up, the men working the coals and the women working the masa. we see neighbors sweeping up yards of dirt and hosing down dusty sidewalks. it’s our version of the today show that unfolds in real time, where we take the pulse of how the night passed and how the day before us might unfold. it’s weather, it’s local news, it’s how we open up our day—just a long and sleepy loop around the block.