Perchance to Dream...

I'm having some difficulty sleeping. Oh, blame it on the heat, or my propensity for drinking coffee until very late at night, but I have another theory. I'm a night owl by nature; I get bursts of inspiration and tend to do my best thinking sometime after midnight, so on a typical night, the rest of my family is already in dreamland when I finally stumble up to bed (this time of quiet solitude may account for the timing of my inspiration, but there you go). Only the dogs snooze by my side or underfoot waiting for me to call it a day.


We have one behemoth of an air conditioner that we use to cool the downstairs during the worst of the heat, and one small, ancient, horrifically noisy little beast, sufficient for cooling a single room. In keeping with the wisdom of the airline industry, we put this in the parents' bedroom. So, on a hot night, this thing goes through its cycles:

rattle rattle rat tattattattattattat rattlerattle griiind griiind griiiiiind rattlerattle

ka-chunk!

ROAR ROAR ROAR GRIND GRIND ROAR KA-CHUNK! rattle rattle.....

Add to this, that my beloved snores. Twenty five years ago, it was a small, cute sort of noise that was in a way reassuring. Over the years, it has morphed into a great, monstrous symphony of snorks, gurgles, and noises that sound like a balloon deflating, and something reptilian trapped in a drain. Nor are they in the least bit rhythmic, in which case it might be possible to adapt. No, each sound is singular, unexpected and guaranteed to jolt one from any light sleep one might have achieved through the previous assault. I use earplugs when I'm not expected to wake to an alarm but as I am the one who drives the kids wherever they need to be in the morning, that's not often.

Years it took to get the kids to stop sleeping in our bed whenever they feel like it (pretty much always) but it took only a single 90 degree night to move them back in. With them, of course, come favorite pillows, stuffed animals, hardcover books, tomorrow's outfit and today's stinky castoffs — arrayed as though shot from a concert canon. Both kids fling bony limbs every which way (earning my son with the adolescent-boy joints the nickname "ankleosaurus"). So we dragged in a twin mattress and told them to make the best of it. The other night, my daughter discovered that the dog bed was infinitely more comfortable than sharing space with her brother.

Now we can’t reach the bed without a half-twisting vault from the doorway only ever attempted by Nadia Comenice in the 1975 Olympic trials; it's not possible to reach the closet by any means at all. And there we have it: beastly AC, symphony of snores; books, clothes, bedding, and mattress on the floor, one kid on said mattress, another kid on the dog bed. And this, I suspect, may be at the root of my insomnia.

The other night I climbed the stairs, performed the vault from the doorway... and landed squarely on a dog. A 70-pound dog whose startled yelp woke the dog occupying my pillow. As I retreated back off the bed, I stepped on the cat. I gave up, went back downstairs, put some Bactine on my cat scratches, and dropped onto the couch.

And can I just say, that is one comfortable couch.