Nighty Night

 Did you sleep well? 

This is a question that I invariably answer with this response: "I made a few mistakes."

As someone who has spent most of his life battling that wall of sleep, I can say that I have finally reached a point in my life where closing my eyes and drifting away has become a solid part of my routine. The biggest difference in the way I head off to slumberland now is, in part, keeping a solid rhythm. Bedtime has become a much earlier affair as I have passed into my sixties. Ten o'clock is "staying up," and most evenings I have retired by nine. 

The timing is useful because it gives me a chance to look at a book. Reading is fundamental. Turning pages and holding a real-life collection of someone else's thoughts helps to distance me from the ones I keep in my head. While very effective, this does not always keep my brain from laboring over any particular day's events. Trouble at school or an appliance that isn't following its prime directive are chief among those speed bumps in my expressway to Snoresville. I try to take my father's words to heart, the ones he spoke to me when I was just nine or ten years old, struggling to drift off. "You can't do anything about it right now. And if you spoil your rest, you won't be much good at making it better in the morning." That was more than fifty years ago, and I'm still trying to argue with him about it. As I try to go to sleep. 

Another thing that has make it easier to get the rest I need is that I spent so much time in my misspent youth trying to stay awake. "I'll sleep when I'm dead," was the phrase that I used to trot out in my party-boy heyday. Some of those late nights that morphed into early mornings gave me a rich sense of the value of just a couple hours of shuteye. As my father suggested, I wasn't a tremendous amount of use after lopping off the bulk of the time I should have been recharging my batteries, but I made it through. Eliminating the potential for a hangover was also a clever part of my overall sleep hygiene. No more passing out and waking up with the Anvil Chorus playing in my head. 

It could be that the advent of my decrepitude and the introduction of my CPAP machine forcing air up my nose into my brain gave me yet another advantage: not waking myself up with the roar of thunder that I acquired through genetics: my father's house-rattling snores. But the most likely reason for me to be able to go to sleep more easily these days is that I am bored. I've seen most everything. Even jury duty is a hill upon which I refuse to die. It's just another part of my busy day. After which I can look forward to a few hours of being not so busy. 

Until the sun comes up yet again.