The gray, drizzly dawn breaks a little ominously. The Boston Common, almost always busy with some activity, is strangely calm early Monday morning except for the muted chatter of the National Guard MPs and the demanding squawk of their walkie-talkies.

Everyone on the Common wears a uniform. Those who don't wait outside, sleeping on the puddly cobblestone bundled in regulation down. And the Common itself wears the finest set of buttons and braid--15,000 specially painted 50-gallon oil drums and close to 18 miles of yellow polyester cord.

The sky is gray, and the breath of the guardsmen steams in the chilly air. But the military on hand know the bleak and hushed atmosphere will not continue long. The white altar, red stairs and yellow flowers, in the floodlit center of the Common, belie the spectacle that will take place in 15 hours. The Pope is coming to Boston, and the city readies herself.

If you try to interrupt the order of the scene, the guardsmen ask you firmly, not nastily, to leave. "No one goes past here," one says, drawing an invisible line. Obey, and you can banter all you want. Cross the mark, though, and suddenly the guard looks more imposing.

Inside the ring of the guardsmen, a few Boston police patrol the Common, wondering at the transformation of the beat they walk each night. One has been gone for four months, off work with a stroke. The altar pleases him; the thought that demonstrators may march on the Common scares him. Graying on the sides like middle-aged cops are supposed to, he worries about the day ahead. "One little thing can set people off," he explains. "You gotta nip it just before it gets out of hand." Another cop, just as Irish as the first, lists the kinds of "maggots" the observer will see. "There will be lots of wallet lifters, and some of the guys who just grab ladies' necklaces and take off with them; and then there's punks, and they just like to harass people."

A Boston College group arrives, six guys and a girl who walked six miles to see the Pope. One, a freshman from Elkhorn, Nebraska, wants to avoid TV cameras. "What if my mother saw it? Sleeping in the streets, cup of coffee in my hand like some bum, and I'll be back to Elkhorn in no time."

Sports activites on Beacon St. wind down as the crowd grows. Earlier, tall men on roller skates careened down the steep hill, in and out between the barrels. The yellow cord now makes that impossible, and anyway, it's getting time to start thinking about serious things, like jockeying for position inside the Common. "As soon as you get in there, spread out," Elkhorn advises. "Take up as much room as you can."

But nobody gets too tense. The bridge game among the St. Elizabeth's parish ladies continues on the sidewalk. A red-and-white taxicab pulls up and, out of the back seat pops an entrepreneur. "$1.75 for sandwich and coffee," he shouts. "Profiteer," someone jeers. "Don't you feel guilty making money off the Pope's visit?" another asks, but obviously the answer is no because the sandwich man is enjoying himself no end. "I hope you get leprosy," Elkhorn's friend yells.

Around the Common, the yellow and white banners flapped in the overcast dawn. Nice banners, but the stylized monogram is a bit tough to make out. "J.P.--John, Paul" one spectator decides. "No, John Portak. I have to get one of these for my brother," another says.

At 5 a.m. the subway starts to roll. Waves of passengers greet the frowning guardsmen. "This way, ma'am, stay on the other side of the yellow rope," the MPs say, and they all do as they are told, most walking down Tremont Street in search of a coffee shop. Dunkin Donuts, the first to open, sells 6 dozen donuts in under a minute, and the proprietor stares with dismay at the disappearing stocks of crullers and jelly-filled. "Shit, we need more donuts. I should have made more donuts," he mutters.

At the street corner, the Boston Globe delivery truck pulls up carrying the early morning edition of the city's largest paper. "City to Greet Pope Today," the front page blares. But for the Globe there is even more important news. The price of the paper has gone up 20 per cent overnight. The first subway crowd is clamoring for the papers, mostly because they realize that the hillside they will sit on for the next twelve hours is cold and wet.

Towards seven, the tension worsens, people hollering at the cops to let them in so they won't lose the places they earned by chilly endurance. The Secret Service insists on "sweeping" the entire Common first for hidden evil, a search-and-destroy operation that requires the pinstripe suit. When the guards finally give the word, the spectators dash towards the line of yellow and white barrels separating the notables from those who will sit in the same mud, but farther back.

The crowd isn't as big as some have predicted. By 10 a.m. there are still acres left unoccupied, and television monitors scattered in the far corners of the park look a little out of place. But a chattering stream of newcomers moves constantly across the Common, spilling out of the Park Street station. They are greeted first by a battalion of souvenir hawkers peddling commemorative medals, half a dozen brands of Pope programs, (the best of which has a full page of the holy father kissing the ground in different locales), dumb bumper stickers (I saw the Pope in Mass"), and blasphemous tee-shirts ("Pope Adds Life").

Closer to the crowded hillside, middle-aged ladies press devotional circulars on the crowd, urging them to visit Bayside, N.Y., "The Lourdes of America." Bayside, apparently, is run by a seer named Veronica Leucken. Her pamphlet includes a plea to the Pope to "convert Russia" and to "save the world from the great flames of the Ball of Redemption that fast approaches." She also inveighs against communion by hand.

Yellow-cuffed ushers hand out small programs with the words of Boston's archbishop, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, are blessed indeed to be the first to greet him on the shores of our generous, hospitable and beloved country," Medeiros says.