Nighty Night

Sleeping when you are married takes on a whole different meaning.

And mostly in our house, it first involved a queen bed. I cannot conceive of this now that we have stepped up to a bed that is best described in width as prairie-like. Our bed is so large, in fact, that when we moved into our new condominium we wondered how, or if it would get up the stairs, through a door and where it sits now, comfortably next to a radiator that is always off because it just gives up too much heat.

Our bedroom is not big but it is not small and since we have no central heat, we switch back and forth from a summer formation in which the bed is parallel to the three window panes that make up our Bay Window (to accommodate our window air conditioning unit), to our winter formation in which it is perpendicular to our window. But, lest I digress.

My wife has several habits that make her have a good night sleep. I have one: bourbon, and maybe bourbon and wine.

Her first critical ingredient to a good night of sleep is that of ambient noise. I find this particularly fascinating because before we were married, I had thought people looked for a quiet place to slumber. But they do not, they look for one in which there is a constant stream of noise from something like an air purifier, air humidifier, a fan, a window unit air conditioner, a small jet engine, a small car, a blender or the various drunks that roam our street at night singing anything from Biz Markey to The Spinners.

Ambient noise takes on these forms in loud ways to me. The air purifier, for example, has four settings that range in noise from hush to loud. My wife picks loud, then I pick hush, then she picks loud. Ambient noise, she explains, keeps other noises out and occupies her so she can fall and stay asleep; while she wears ear plugs.

My wife also has back problems. She has mild scoliosis. Her spine leans to the right and left. Mine does as well and I have also been diagnosed with the same condition. I can only imagine this will mean we will appear on some sort of telethon after year 2 of the birth of our first child.

To remedy this problem, she uses a body pillow. A body pillow is a longer version of a regular pillow that is harder and less restful than a regular pillow and consistently intermingles with your pillow so that when you fall asleep, you feel it get yanked away from your head so it can be used as a body pillow. The body pillow is but one ingredient of my wife’s pillow flotilla. She surrounds herself with not one, but then two other pillows such that she could float from Havana to Miami simply by latching all of them together with palm fronds.

As she sleeps, each of the pillows revolves and moves. So the bed moves.

There are two more ingredients. One, my wife needs the alarm clock next to her without exception. Two, she needs her back scratched every night. When she does so, she asks me in a little girl voice to “do it good” (more on the little girl voice later on in our blog).

The alarm clock being next to her means that she sets it before we go to bed. It is quite endearing actually, having your wife know what time you wake up on different days or o sweetly ask you “what time, sweetie?” Never having had that before, I gush at the mere though of it. However, there is an accompanying evil to the alarm clock being on her nightstand; sometimes she sets the alarm and resets the clock.

I first noticed this when I woke up one morning really, really tired. I walked out into the hallway and saw our dog, Duncan, who usually rushes into bed once he hears the alarm go off, simply look at me confused as if to say – “Dude, what are you doing?” I ignored him, brewed coffee, showered and shaved, and came into the kitchen where I looked at the stove to find that its clock read 4:45 a.m. Confused, I looked at my phone to confirm the time and sure enough, I had risen a full 1.5 hours early.

As to the back scratching, I kind of like it. However, I get concerned because my wife has very fair skin and I fear that my nails will literally make her bleed. But they don’t, and it all works out.

I am not a very good sleeper. I blame this on genetics. My father, brother and sister all share in arising early in some form of panic about work, the house, kids, jobs, money, dusting, you name it. We really should all just call each other at 3:30 nearly every morning; we could all catch up away from all the sounds of the every day.

But on those occasions when I do wake up, I look over and I look at the person next to me. My wife. I mean, she chose to be with me out of everyone else. And, I am crazy. She is angelic, so peaceful and resting completely oblivious to the outside world and warm and cozy in her bed.

Until the alarm clock pierces the noise of the humidifier at 4 a.m.