8:05 a.m. - Morning Songs

The busking spot at Queen's Park was flooded with sunlight.

People streamed through the corridor past me and then rode up the elevator on their way to work. If I turned my head to watch them ascend to street level, I looked up to the skylight and stared into early morning brightness.

In less than a month's time, the kids will be home for summer vacation, so I will need to sing in the early morning before Dave goes to work (or at night after he comes home) if I am to sing at all. That kind of schedule would have seemed challenging in the dark of winter. But on warm and clear mornings like this one, I'm happy to be up early.

I have a new song to try out today. It's called "Lived-In Look" and is about long-term love and commitment. It's a sunny, optimistic and grateful song, and it works beautifully in the subway, eliciting many cheerful smiles of understanding from people passing by. It's a morning song.

Other recent songs of mine, "New Guitar" for instance, are night-time songs: songs inspired by darker emotions such as restlessness and disappointment. (This isn't to say that I don't sing them at other times of day. Now that I'm busking regularly I'm playing ALL of my songs, including some I thought I'd forgotten, and I want to learn as many good songs written by others as possible. But some songs do seem to match certain settings and times better than others.)

This experience has taught me that I need all of my songs. In the larger context of my life, the daytime songs are the ones I've been most comfortable in for awhile; they have suited my social role of wife and mother. At the same time, the darker nighttime songs (which are now coming into the open) are providing some rich new shadows.

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Looking around at the sunlit cathedral-like vestibule this morning, it seemed a completely different place than the dark and isolated place that I'd needed to escape last fall.

When the large man in stained clothes shuffled through the station around 9:30 a.m., I knew him immediately. He was the unstable and potentially dangerous man I met while busking alone at Queen's Park station after dark.

In the bright daylight today, with hundreds of people passing by, he didn't seem so large or imposing. But because of my previous experience and my increased subway savvy, I automatically avoided his eyes.

I realized later the sadness in that decision. After all, last time we met, we had had a conversation. Yes, it was short and highly-controlled, because I was doing my best to get away from him. But still, it was a conversation in which he told me about his home and the music he enjoys.

Today, even though it would have been safe for me to interact with him, I chose not to. I deliberately didn't catch his eye or acknowledge him in any way, even though in the daylight with so many other people nearby, he posed no threat.

It struck me that I'd gained some street smarts.

And possibly lost some compassion.

($27.18)