Window on the Morning

I sure do like it here. Who thinks up all this entertainment for us?Four hours ago the world was indigo-blue when I shot up in the bed and let out a yelp. I had dreamed a bird flew at my face, then got stuck in my hair, which Old Dave calls ‘the Net’ because all kinds of things get stuck there.He heard me yelp, dealing as he was with Chapter 20,569 in Dave’s Own Book of Insomnia. He says he just opened one eye, thought “Good ol’ TT” and went back to sleep.So four hours ago we had Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds" around here and now in a few minutes the sun is going to be up and spreading its unconditional love all over the place, even on the messy lawns and sidewalks ankle-deep in leaves with last night’s winds.People are glad to wake up, that’s what I think, however much they moan about having to crawl out from under those covers.We all have our rituals, the bathing, the drinking something hot, the stretching... Maybe we fire up the television and let the paid cheer of the morning news team wash over us. “They care!” we’re meant to think. "They want us to start the day informed of the latest roll-over, low pressure system, house fire!" It’s not exactly the way our mothers used to wake us but it will do.So here it is Monday of the week of heavy obligation I whined about yesterday, only rather than feeling burdened I feel content. Content and even happy to be stitched so tightly into the fabric of my community.Just now our neighbor inched up out of his driveway just like always. The newspaper whumped down onto our sidewalk at the usual time too. All over the land teachers are walking down the still-empty corridors toward their classrooms, and the lines at the drive-thrus are eight and ten deep with the eat-on-the-run types.When I get up, I make coffee and sit right down here for an hour – and now I'm remembering I told a favored friend I would find her some footage of a ginkgo tree and sure enough here is a YouTube clip of one in Anduze, France.I watched it three times before I noticed what people left as comments underneath it. Two years ago somebody wrote “That’s a beauty!!!!” Then eight months ago another person said “Ginkgo the best!” Lastly a year ago, somebody else again viewed the same footage and wrote “my cats staring at me and I’m worried cos i havent fed him, mmmmm nice tree.”I like that last one ungrammatical as it is, the way the person registers obligation and beauty. Her cat and this lovely old tree having its hair combed by the wind. The near and the far. It shows just exactly how we live.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyH6S1IcZJI&feature=related]

My Friend the Internet

I've had some great insomnia suggestions from the Facebook crowd. Somebody said take Benadryl (but doesn’t the suck the moisture out of your whole skull so your nostrils stick shut and your tongue turns into snakeskin?)  Somebody said take melatonin right before bed, “it works every time.” (But for me it work hardly at all and my doc said better to take an over the counter sleep-aid than  overuse the melatonin which is a hormone after all. “Let’s not mess with your hormones,” she went on to which I say “Uh can you write GOD a letter to that effect for me?”)People are so jaunty and helpful when you reach out for help on the web.Once I wrote a column about the leg and foot cramps I was getting  where I found myself yelling "Somebody get me a hacksaw, whiskey and a bullet to bite on! I am amputating this thing!” The suggestions that time came in email and letter form. They were:

• Take quinine
• Take calcium
• Take zinc
• Take all three together
• Lean  into a wall, heels pressed to the floor, and...
• Place an unwrapped bar soap just under your bottom sheet.  

Two separate people actually suggested this last, one person adding that Irish Spring was the soap to use and the other testifying to the fact that an area physician had named this same tactic in a can’t-hurt-to-try-it feature he writes in her local paper. So see? You’re only alone till you reach out on this frisky world wide web that God gave us instead of toys. Then stand back because here comes a whole cavalry of help!                                                               

What You Need

Princess Diana is buried with the rosary beads Mother Teresa gave her when they met. That was a year or more before she was hunted down like the poor bunny by the ravening foxes.

She wasn’t religious as far as I know but she admired that little gnome of a Mother T, cruelly 'outed' after her death as a doubter like the rest of us.

And I totally see why Diana took to her. Mother Theresa was very blunt and most people like bluntness. She was also quick to dismiss what stuck her as trivial. I remember when she came here once to look in on one of the modest urban dwellings of her order of nuns, some good soul tried to give the house a few air conditioners. “We don’t need air conditioners!” she told them, swatting away the idea.

Sometimes when I’m feeling sorry for myself lately – with the stress of modern life and the insomnia that’s been driving my husband David crazy for the last six months- (I’m perfectly quiet on my side of the bed which is how he can tell, I guess: no deep breathing. “Stop being awake!” he says – and I TRY to stop. Lately we take turns with our insomnia. I finally get out of the bed and stun myself with a scalding bath. I climb back in – now it's 3 am and I haven’t slept yet – and at 3:05 HE climbs out and goes down to his couch in the living room where he reads his endless whodunits ‘til sleep overtakes him at 4 or 4:30.) As I say lately when I’m feeling sorry for myself it comes into my head that I’m not in pain, not hungry, not unsafe - and all the rest falls away, thank God, thank God. It's so tiresome to be self-involved.

One day I will give away all my possessions (maybe to my kids first if they even want them) and then I’ll give away my diaries. Smith College has graciously offered to accept and guard these volumes begun upon in 1958 when I was a little girl lying through my teeth on paper.

"Give them to Smith?! Give them to your children!” David says and maybe I will but what a painful and stinging thing it is to read your mother’s diaries (as I well know who have read all my mother’s going back to 1916 when she was a sad-faced uncertain girl not doing her homework and getting lousy marks in school.)

And yet I have her 1921 volume next to my bed and I read it before sleep sometimes and think “I am the only one who gets these references.”

I get them because when we were little our mother and aunt who raised my sister and me told and told – all the stories. All the non-stories. Everything. In the end when Mom was in ER after ER I would say to her “Let’s leave this place Mum. Let’s time travel” and out would come more stories.It’s true we might not need air conditioners; but we sure do need that connection with the past.