In a New England City

   It's easy to forget you're sleeping on pavement when you're dead tired from another day in the city. As you stumble out of whatever doorway offered shelter for the evening, however, sore and aching limbs make it easy to remember.

   Shaking the sleep from my head, I counted the change I had scrounged from the day before as I waited for a man wearing a business suit in front of me to order his coffee. I had just enough money for a medium coffee, so I ordered a french vanilla. As I waited for the girl with the heavy accent behind the counter, praying she wouldn't get my coffee wrong, I surveyed my surroundings.

   At 7:00 am the train station was just barely coming to life. The people coming off the trains were beginning to grow in number, their footfalls echoing through the cavernous underground station. The vendors with their strretcarts were beginning to set out their wares for the day, t- shirts, souveneir hats, honey roasted peanuts, books, and maps. But my favorite cart was the fruit cart.   

    Everyday, a middle aged Brazilian man would come and set up a fruit stand, laden with all varieties of fruit, from cherries and raspberries, to bananas and mangos, peaches, pears, even starfruit. The cart was so heavy with fruit that the smell often wafted, whetting my hunger painfully. I absolutely adored fruit, but the cart charged steep prices, and I was lucky to pull in even a few dollars a day spare changing. My morning coffee alone was at least ninety-five cents.

   Oh yeah. Coffee. I snapped out of my idle thoughts to find the girl behind the counter impatiently trying to get my attention. Sheepishly I paid for my coffee and headed for the two flights of stairs leading above ground. On the landing between the stairs, the brazilian man was just beginning to open boxes of ripe peaches for his display. The smell hit me, and I could almost taste their lush juiciness. Quickly I hurried up the next flight of stairs, and up onto the street.

   There were less people about on street level than under. I paused in the station square, watching the newspaper stands getting their last morning deliveries, while a man with a briefcase shook his head at the mornings headline, then walked away reading the rest of the article. The clock on the bank building towering above me read 7:10, but the sun had not yet managed to clear the tops of the skyscrapers, leaving the streets still eerily dim and chilly. Sipping my coffee, I was pleasantly surprised to find the girl had not ruined my order. I was less pleasantly surprised by scalding my tongue, causing me to jump and spill some on my shirt. Muttering and cursing to myself I decided now was the perfect time for a cigarette ration.

   Cigarettes, were a novelty item. On any given day, if you were lucky, you might aquire 8. Sometimes more, depending on your persistance, but for the same reason I did a poor job of spare changing, I also did a poor job in aquiring cigarettes. I just didn't feel right asking people to give up what was rightfully theirs. Today I had 3 cigarettes saved from the day before to start. Provided nothing stressful occured after this point, that should be enough to last me for another 5 or six hours. Hopefully, this would be plenty of time to bum some more before I ran out completely.

   So I lit a cigarette, and decided to wait out the cooling of my coffee on a bench down near the river. And so I went, on the three block walk through the waking city, down to the banks of the quiet river.