Bob Graham Woke Up This Morning

Bob Graham

has what so much of the world, the internet, and swaths of Substack often lacks—heart. It’s a heart that is tender and bitter in a pleasant way, like a blackberry that’s been picked a little too early. When I asked Bob if he’d write something for me, I told him to send whatever. But he didn’t just send whatever. He sent me some blues. He sent me something that made my head bob, my foot tap, and my heart thump. I figure it’ll do the same to y’all.

Here he is,

Bob Graham

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When a blues song opens with I woke up this morning, that’s how I know it’s going to be a great song. That’s how I know that the person singing really has the blues. The moment their brain came online, they felt like shit. I felt like singing the blues when I woke up today. It would go like this: 

I woke up this mornin’/To a rooster crowing outside my door 

I imagine I would sound like Howlin’ Wolf when I sang it, although I don’t sound anything like him. That’s why we all love Howlin’ Wolf so much. He’s the only one there has ever been.

Anyways, in my Howlin’ Wolf voice, I would sing about this rooster that keeps waking me up before it’s time to wake up. It belongs to my neighbours across the road. He was crying out in the stillness of daybreak, loud enough for our whole hamlet to hear. Some folks who have romantic ideas about living in the country think it’s a pretty cute idea to get woken up by the cries of a neighbourhood rooster, but please let me assure you, it is not. I hate roosters. Roosters and I go a long ways back. The hatred has been brewing for a while. I think these people think that a rooster crows once or twice in an act of good-willed courtesy, and then you rub your eyes with balled-up fists and take a big stretch and then whip your curtains open to greet the day, and everything works out with ease. It is not so. Roosters are persistent bastards, and they don’t know when to stop. They put their screams on a loop until they can’t do it anymore, which is going to last about thirty minutes longer than when you start imagining yourself stomping over there in the morning fog, clad in only your ginch, prepared to tussle with the demented, shrieking banshee of dawn. I would be singing my song the whole way over to the neighbour’s yard, Howlin’ Wolf cuttin’ through the fog and the dew. The rooster calling back to me the only way he knows how. It would be a sort of sonic, creeping call and response of crows and howls. Both of us communicating earnestly but without a desire for understanding. Each one bouncing off of the other as the distance between the two of us slowly fades down to one bit of disastrous ambient tension. The fog would conceal the refrain, the rising sun backlighting the affair. It would sound like this:

Yes, I woke up this mornin’/To a rooster crowing outside my door

Lord, if you don’t stop that little bird’s singing/I’ll make sure it don’t sing no more

This is not the first time I’ve dreamed of killing a rooster.

I lived with my best friend, Sam, for one year after I moved back home from the city when I became too depressed and drunk to continue my fledgling studies at college. I became too comfortable being depressed and drunk at my place in the city, so when I decided it was time to go home, I knew that living with my folks was not an option. It was frowned upon to be openly drunk around them and downright unacceptable to be depressed. So I called up my best buddy, who had recently bought some farmland that just happened to have a house on it. I said to him, “Hey buddy! I don’t want to live in the city anymore, and I’m too depressed and drunk to live with my folks. Still got an extra room?” And he said back to me, “You bet your ass I do, why don’t you move in tomorrow?” So I said ok.

He was a good sport about it. He let me be as depressed and drunk as I wanted to be. Fortunately for me, lots of our friends were also managing the same affliction that I was. So we would all get together in that house and play cards and smoke cigarettes and listen to Merle Haggard records and talk about how these were the best days of our lives. 

My bedroom at Sam’s place was the closest part of the house to his chicken coop. Not that it particularly mattered, these chickens were also free range, had the run of the entire yard. They could wander out into the field if they wanted to, or even as far as the road. They were smart enough to stop at the end of the driveway though. Despite these options, they most often gathered right beneath my window. Sam, at the time, had well over a hundred chickens, the flock may well have been pushing two hundred. I can’t quite remember, for obvious reasons. 

Of these many chickens, about a dozen were roosters. And they were mean sons of bitches. Territorial and in more competition than a bunch of bros gathered around one of those punching bag machines that you sometimes see in horrible bars. 

Once one of them called out, they would all crow. Seeing who could be the loudest, fanciest cock of them all. I could start to identify them individually based on their call. They would crow at all hours of the day, didn’t matter when. A truck could drive down the gravel road, and that would set them off. A dog’s bark in the distance, mayhem. The sun would be too bright, the stars too shining, nothing could stop their disruptions. I spent so many hours staring at the popcorn ceiling in that room, unable to sleep, imagining how I would kill each and every one of those pathetic descendants of dinosaurs. I wanted a new extinction. 

Just like I did back then at Sam’s house, this morning I sat wide awake a full hour before my alarm was set to go off. The same ancient sounds bounced across the road, through the yard, and along the cool breeze that crept through the window screen to rest upon me warm in my bed as I smelled the autumn in the air. 

I think I was seven when my grandpa died. He was the first close person to me to pass away. I couldn’t comprehend it. I spent the nights following his death more awake than I’d ever been, staring at a different white ceiling in my childhood bed. Staring up and out into forever, running my brain as hard as it could go to try to understand the concept that I would cease to be one day. If he could die, then so would I. The math was simple, but the answer was impossible. I could grasp onto the reality just briefly enough to scare myself back from it and feel my soul drop out from beneath me and into the abyss. I would cry often and into the night. My mom would hear me and take me out of bed into a different room with an upright century-old piano, with a bright white moon shining into the window onto the corduroy rocking chair that she attempted to comfort me in. Wrapping me in her lap, all tucked up, almost to the point where I was too big to sit like that. We would rock back and forth. She told me that death is not so scary because we believe in heaven, and isn’t it great that there’s another place we can go to? I nodded my head as she wiped tears from my eyes, even though I didn’t quite feel what she had told me. I believed her words but couldn’t feel them in my heart. And I didn’t want to tell her I couldn’t feel it, cause I thought that she might get scared just like me. That made me feel even more helpless, and I couldn’t stop crying. So she would hum to me.

She hummed softly and sweetly, and I could feel the vibration from her throat transfer into my belly, and it filled up with melty, gooey, warm goodness until I felt safe enough to drift off into everywhere again. My mother’s humming of sweet melodies into my baby soul, the sound to cook me down and simmer me into calm. It is a more rudimentary form of communication but somehow more effective than speech. Her heart translating itself to mine, so we could commune for a moment, in perfect comprehension.  

The antithesis of a rooster calling for awakening and death. My mother sweetly beckoned sleep and an extra dose of existence. The opposite ends of day and other sides of life.     

I lay in bed feeling the morning threaten to come to fruition through the window. I remember my mother’s humming. The soft vibration and warm overtones through our bones. Today’s incessant crowing sent me forward in time from there. To Sam’s house. With the dozens calling louder than ever, insurmountable, hungover, alone, and empty. To now, only one, in the distance. Distressing, ever-present, but manageable. My mother’s melody still in me. It tickled the revolutionary, pink guts of my heart. Those things that are just in you, and they got to come out. 

Yes, my friends. I woke up this morning and I had the blues real bad. I woke up this morning to a rooster crowing outside my door. 

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If you’re not already reading

Uncle Bob Is Ruminating

, go do it. There’s plenty more where that came from.

Hello, world.