Night Workers

If I were a poet, that's what I'd write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cab drivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, "How's it going, how's the kids?" They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.

-from White Oleander by Janet Fitch

I've always loved this passage in Fitch's book, having been a night worker of one sort or another for most of my life. I come by my preference for being up at odd hours honestly; my mother was a night nurse for years, and even before she graduated nursing school and began working true graveyards, she would stay up late, especially when my dad was traveling for work, and she would keep me up in bed with her. I'm rather famous in family circles for having entertained everyone with my Ed McMahon impression ("Heeeeeeeere's Johnny!") at three years old.

All my life I've been most productive during the hours when most of the rest of the Western Hemisphere is asleep. I've written many a college paper, organized a kitchen cabinet, knitted a sock and even labored with Cali at three in the morning. I remember a night, long ago, when I was travelling in Europe. I got off the train in an underground station in Barcelona, and came up into a street filled with music, dancing and revelry. I asked around to find out what time it was, and to my surprise found out it was four in the morning--on a weekday! I felt like I had come home to my people. I still have an especial fondness for Catalonia and the late-night hours of its citizens.

A couple of years ago, after years working as a bartender, I took a true third shift job in the emergency room, and found the real truth in Fitch's words. It is impossible to hang on to illusions when you spend night after night looking into the eyes of the dying, the suicidal, the desperate and afraid. What illusions can be left when you've seen the reality of the homeless and drug-addicted who come to ask for a prescription for a sandwich? The elderly for whom an ER nurse is the first person to change their blood and feces-soaked diapers in days? The wild-eyed and grief-stricken mother who would give everything she had to see her child take another breath? No, there are no illusions after one has seen such things.

Emergency room workers, especially those on nights, are a hardy and humorous bunch. They have to be, to keep coming back to clean up blood and vomit while the healthy, in body and mind, sleep. You would never know from their crass jokes, and careless demeanor how each incident adds another grain of sand to the weight they carry in their chests.

At six am, after the last cup of coffee has been drained, the half-eaten donuts thrown in the trash, the report given to the freshly showered and shampoo-smelling day staff, they leave and get in their cars. The wry smiles fade from their faces, the upright and gritty posture slumps. They drive home through the misty dawn thinking of the night just passed. And alone in the car, with no one to share with, the humor and bravado ebbs, leaving sadness and exhaustion. And when they get home, they hug their children tight.