Month: August 2020

All Alone In The Middle Of The Night

I roll over and look at the clock. It glows cheerily in the dark: 3:04.

I roll back over and look out past the sleeping form of my wife to the twinkling stars in the night sky out our bedroom window, which of course are little more than twinkling blobs since I am not wearing the glasses I have had to wear since I was in the fifth grade. I close my eyes to go back to sleep.

Except I need to pee. I sigh, get up and go to the bathroom. Back in bed, I pull up the covers and close my eyes once more. I wait for sleep or, if I were poetically inclined, which I sometimes am in the middle of the night, to fall into the arms of Morpheus. I lie there comfortably, ready to drift off.

What was that noise? Was it inside or out? Animal or mechanical? Neither, I decide as I sit up in bed. Just the wind.

I lie back down. Geez, what is wrong with my pillow? It used to be really comfortable. I punch it into submission. There. Better.

I feel a bit cool what with that breeze that I think was making that noise and wonder if I should reach down and get the rest of the covers that, now that I think about it, are roasting my feet. It seems like a lot of trouble to reach all the way down there. Then I’d probably be too hot, like my feet. I’ll pass. For now.

I roll over. F is sound asleep. Good for her. At least one of us is. Snoring softly. I wish I was. Maybe I should wake her so I can tell her I’m having trouble sleeping … no, no,no. That would be wrong. Just like me being awake while she snoozes is wrong. No, no. Don’t think that way. That’s just jealousy.

I take a peek at the clock. 3:22. Okay, time to go back to sleep. Concentrate. Wait, what? Concentrate on sleep? That’s kind of a contradiction, isn’t it? Or not, my mind is a bit fuzzy right now. I need sleep.

Maybe if I read for a bit. Don’t even need to turn the light on and risk waking F what with my e-book right there. But then I’d have to sit up, rearrange this damnable pillow that is already uncomfortable again. And that means I will be committed to being awake for awhile, as opposed to the chance I could be asleep in a moment.

Yeah. A fat chance. I stick my feet, still smoldering from the bed spread piled up at the foot of the bed, out of the covers. I could kick the spread to the floor. But then they would be lost forever if I decided I needed them later in the night. Morning. Whatever. What time is it anyway? No, don’t look, it will just lead to despair. 

3:52. Damn. I was right. Very despairing. I’m going to wake up in the morning all tired and grouchy, not my usual perky bright-eyed and busy-tailed self. Unless I go to sleep right now. Take a deep breath and relax … what is that smell?

Is that a skunk? Is it right outside our screen door to the deck? Is it eating F’s tomatoes in the pots out there? Do I care? I don’t like them – the tomatoes; I have no particular dislike of skunks, other than their smell. And it would serve her right, snoring away over there rather than on guard to protect her precious tomatoes, the nasty little things. No, no. That’s frustration talking. I need some sleep, is all. That was a skunk I smell, but he’s off in the woods somewhere and the scent is faint. Thank goodness.

Okay. Let’s get serious now. Relax. Whew. Why is my body feeling so creaky and uncomfortable? This bed that is usually so comfy feels lumpy and hard and is killing my back. The pillow ain’t exactly a bed of roses, either. I’ll just have a quick glance … AHHH! 4:14! No, no, no. This is unacceptable. It’ll be time to get up before I ever get to sleep. But then I’ll at least maybe get some breakfast, because I’m starving. And thirsty, too. No, then I’ll have to pee again.

Come to think of it, I could pee again. Okay, I’ll go do that, but then it’s definitely off to dreamland.

I’m ready. C’mon, sleep. I’m dozing off. I’m thinking about how sleepy I am, how I could just nod right off. I’m not thinking about insomnia, I’m thinking calm and peaceful thoughts about … what am I doing tomorrow? Do I need to run errands in town? What am I supposed to be cooking for dinner tomorrow night? What night is that? What night is tonight, I mean this morning? Why am I asking all these questions? And who am I talking to?

If F was awake I could talk to her … no, no, no. Let her sleep. 

I look out the window again. Is there faint light starting to appear in the sky? Ah, #@&$, the damn early birds will soon be starting up with the chirping and twittering, right outside the window no doubt, and then I’ll never get back to sleep. This is the worst night ever. And why are my feet so damn cold? Oh, yeah. They’re out of the covers.

Not moving, not moving, not moving. Other than to scratch my leg. And that place there on my back. Sleep, sleep, sleep … that’s what I want. Wonder what I’m going to write about next for my blog? How about how I used to put my head on the pillow at night and wake up the next morning without interruption or having to go to the bathroom 14 times or being bothered by random thoughts. Sure, I didn’t always wake up refreshed since there were those times in my youth that I was a regular night owl and stayed up to 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. Then we had children, and we went months without a decent night’s sleep, getting up at all hours to feed them, hold them, rock them back to sleep and it totally and apparently permanently ruined my sleep cycle.

It’s their fault, the miserable little … no, no. They are wonderful children who are now all grown up and not living in our house disturbing our sleep. Maybe I should give them a call to see if they’re awake at, oh let’s see, 4:25, and reminisce about the good old days when they were wee tots. 

Who cares what time it is? I’ll just lie here for a bit longer and then go ahead and get up. Get an early start on the day. Up and at ’em; I can’t wait. Funny, I used to love sleeping in, but now I find it hard to just lie there in the mornings. There used to be nothing better than snuggling under the covers, no school or work or problems ahead that day, happy and content….

What time is it now? 7:15?! What? How? I must have dozed off. But this can’t be. It’s time to get up. F will be jumping out of bed any moment now. But I just got back to sleep. I don’t wanna get up. I just wanna lie here in peace, with no worries, no plans, no problems … just for a few more minutes.

Whew. Sometimes this sleeping really wears me out.

A Taste Of Summer

I was not born in the South, which perhaps explains the fact that I don’t particularly like eating some of the Southern food staples such as collards, field peas and chicken livers. 

And while I have come late in life to enjoy the finer points of grits, I suppose I will never be considered a true Southerner despite living in various parts of the South since I was 12 because, well, there simply is no way to put this politely: I don’t like tomatoes.

No juicy slab of Big Boy or Red Beefsteak on two pieces of white bread slathered in Duke’s mayo for this boy, no sir. Eating the devil’s fruit, unless it has been converted (and consecrated with some wine) into tomato sauce or sliced, diced and overpowered with peppers in salsa, is not going to happen.

This distaste for this ubiquitous Southern fruit was never held against me by my mother, who grew up on a North Carolina farm during the Depression and therefore ate any and everything put on the table (although she confessed to me more than once that she never did acquire a taste for possum). 

And my wife, who knows her way around a ‘mater sandwich, no longer encourages me to try a slice or pop a cherry tomato in my mouth, having given up on that fight after raising two children with their own distinct and confounding eating preferences (I mean, what exactly is the difference between Kraft and Velveeta macaroni, other than one child will pout or sob if their preferred brand of cheesy noodle was not being served that night?)

On the other hand, there’s nothing that says summertime food in the South more than corn on the cob. 

I was wildly naive and, shall we say, lacking the proper palate for appreciating the subtleties of corn varieties during my early years eating it off of the cob. In the Midwest at that time, all I remember being available was the large, fully formed, dark yellow ears with kernels you really had to gnaw at to dislodge from the cob.

Later, as I was indoctrinated into Southern cuisine, I discovered that what I had thought of as corn may as well have come out of a can when compared to the holy grail, the creme de la creme, the pinnacle of modern agricultural achievement: sweet corn. Preferably plucked from the stalk and immediately plopped into water that you already had boiling. 

Ah, butter dribbling down your bare arms as you munched through row after row of indescribably sweet goodness, your teeth barely grazing the surface as the kernels graciously jumped off the cob into your mouth. At our house, my mom would cook vats full for our family of five. Because we weren’t allotted just one or two ears apiece, we consumed four or six (or, in the case of my sister, eight or 10). All other food on the table had to wait its turn to be eaten, because it’s corn, it’s gonna get cold (and then the butter wouldn’t melt on it), and my sister just finished another ear and is grabbing for the next best one available.

Poor Mom, she would get to nibble on an ear, then she’d jump back up and rush into the kitchen to empty another pot (this was before microwaves, which is how we cook ours now unless there is a hot grill nearby) and deliver its contents to us slavering beasts waiting impatiently for some more hot ones like we were hogs grunting and rooting around for just one more kernel in the slop, which I guess we kind of were.

Nowadays real sweet corn – I was always partial to Silver Queen myself – doesn’t seem to be as prevalent, but that just may be because we live in the mountains where, while we are geographically in the South, our weather and much of our culture and customs are uniquely our own. Most of what we’ve been eating lately is bicolor corn, alternating light and dark yellow like a checkerboard. I don’t know exactly what bicolor corn is, some sort of politically correct hybrid? Are you throwing in some dark yellow kernels to attract the non-Southerners who don’t know what real sweet corn is? Whatever, it’s still corn and it’s still good.

Second only to sweet corn in the summer panoply of great veggies are cucumbers. I remember as a kid helping my relatives pick and wash cucumbers when we visited the farm where my mom grew up and watching my uncles grade them for market, so I think I know a thing or two about cukes. I won’t say I eat them every day in the summer, but there are not many days that go by that I don’t if I have access to ones I know my uncles would have approved of.

F and I used to grow all these wonderful veggies, plus many more. Squash that would come so fast and plentiful you couldn’t give them away. Green peppers that you could watch turn red, snow peas that rivaled corn for their sweetness if you waited until right before dinner to pick them, green beans that you had to snap by hand but that forced you to sit and relax (preferably in a rocking chair) while you did it, just as you had to sit and shell those wondrous bits of beautiful greenness, butter beans.

We don’t garden much anymore, long ago surrendering to the critters that ravaged our rows of goodness just as we were about to harvest them. The deer, the rabbits, the groundhogs, the raccoons … just like the little masked bandit who recently has been nightly raiding F’s two potted tomato plants sitting on the deck right outside our bedroom door.

Fortunately, however, we don’t have to depend on grocery stores for most of our vegetative intake during the summer. We have a nice farmer’s market that offers a variety of locally produced food including all types of meat, supplemented by an online, virtual farm-to-table market available year-round (the High Country Food Hub). We have roadside produce stands that offer stuff that isn’t easy to grow in the mountains, like peaches and, another of our summertime favorites, okra. And we have a son who is a farmer who generously shares his bounty with us, perhaps as a way to pay us back for the thousands of ears of corn he ingested as a child.

The key to all this great food is that it is seasonal and it is fresh. If you are buying your vegetables during the summer in a way that they are not fresh – in cans, in bags, in the freezer section – don’t. Just don’t. Go find a place that sells fresh stuff. It will taste better, last longer, be healthier for you, and it will support your neighbors. 

And unless it’s grown in a greenhouse, it will only be available for a sweet, short while. Just like summer.

In The Good Ol’ Summertime

When I was growing up there were only two seasons that I was aware of: in school and out of school.

Oh sure, you instinctively knew the joys of hot summer days, but that just meant it was summer vacation, and you knew winter meant sledding and snowball fights (at least during those years when I wasn’t living on a tropical island, where seasons are a whole different story), but that was only on weekends or holidays when you didn’t have, well, school.

And don’t get me started on spring and fall. Spring meant that summer vacation was approaching, while fall meant it was ending.

If this gives you the impression that I hated school, I apologize. I generally enjoyed school, even though as I’ve mentioned before I was a Navy brat so we moved a lot and I was the new kid in school every two or three years, but my dazzling academic brilliance made up for the fact that I was shy and, looking back, pretty much a nerd. (This academic prowess, by the way, dissipated in college when I discovered a social life I had not previously enjoyed, not to mention some alternate means of enlightenment not found in the classroom.)

No, what I really enjoyed was summer. Long, hot sunny days spent outside running wild until dinnertime, swimming and playing endless made-up games, cooling off by running through a sprinkler or plopped down in front of a fan (we didn’t always have air conditioning in the old days), drinking gallons of Kool-Aid and downing dozens of ice cream cones, not having to wear unnecessary attire like shoes and jackets and shirts….

And, of course, running around in the yard on warm, humid evenings catching fireflies in jars and putting them on your nightstand by your bed as a natural nightlight while you slept in your warm, humid bedroom (see no AC, above).

I had a wonderful childhood and I remember almost all of it with great fondness and nostalgia, but it wasn’t until I grew older that I started appreciating the seasons. Part of it was the fact that you trade the academic cycle when you had those precious few weeks of summer for the endless grind of a job and precious little time off in any season. 

I feel that now I pay attention to nature more than I ever did. While I will never be a fan of cold weather, I can appreciate the beauty of snow and the brilliance of the stars on a cold winter night. Autumn means cool nights, the smell of leaves and, sadly, the reintroduction of socks. Spring is all about green after months of brown and gray, and watching the magical transformation of yards and trees and flowers into what ultimately becomes, yes, my favorite time of year.

We live in the mountains, so we are blessed in the summer with cool or, at worse, warmish nights, perfect for sitting outside after the sun sets watching darkness descend. The tree frogs or crickets or katydids or whatever they are start up their buzzing and chirping, the quintessential song of summer if there ever was one. At our house we watch the bats flap out into the darkening sky, snatching up insects as they dart and zigzag about, only occasionally getting tangled in your hair or going for your jugular (just kidding!). And, best of all, the fireflies come out flashing and blinking in their spectacular light show, just like they did when I was a kid.

Fireflies, or lightning bugs if you prefer, are truly wondrous creatures. I mean, think about explaining them to people who’ve never seen them: “Yep, where I come from, we have these bugs, you see, and they fly around at night and their butts light up! Yes, their butts! Blinking on and off. Dunno why, probably attracting the lady bugs – no not those ladybugs, but lady bugs – or vice versa. Say, wouldn’t that be something if humans … nah, never mind.”

I was watching the fireflies the other night when we were outside once again futilely looking for the latest supposedly awesome meteor shower in which fireballs were expected to tear across the sky. F and I don’t seem to have much luck with these types of celestial displays, particularly for two people who spend an inordinate amount of time looking up at the sky. Our adult children still give us grief for the times we dragged them out of bed at 5 in the morning to look at yet another underwhelming meteor shower. But that’s okay, because the night sky even without streaking lights is pretty spectacular, and every four weeks you can count on a full moon to brighten things up.

Since we live in an area with long winters, we keep track of the sun more than a lot of people. We notice where it rises, when and where it shines in our house, and as I have mentioned before when and where it sets. We know when the summer solstice is by how far to the right the sun sets on the ridge line we see from our deck. 

And inwardly I cringe when I can tell that it is slowly inching back to the left, realizing that soon the sun won’t be as high in the sky, or shine as brightly or as warmly, which means that, well, summer vacation will soon be over.

The Hidden Benefits Of Wearing A Mask

I don’t want to get into a political debate about wearing face masks during the pandemic because, well, that’s a subject that shouldn’t be about politics. Few of us enjoy wearing masks, but I was thinking that there are some definite upsides to covering your face. 

Other than spreading a deadly disease, of course.

  • Bad breath is not as noticeable. Forget those breath mints; your mouth is covered! Who’s going to smell that odiferous odor emanating from your otherwise ordinary orifice (sorry, the alliterative aspect of that articulation was altogether too alluring). On the other hand, don’t overdo the garlic for lunch since you’ll still be breathing your own fumes in close confinement, so to speak.
  • Lipstick is no longer necessary. Ladies, who cares? We can’t see your lips, so we don’t know if you’re sporting Flamboyant Fuchsia or Luscious Lavender on those smackers. But if you just can’t bear the thought of someone seeing you lipstickless, you can always paint some on your mask.
  • Nose hair trimming. Why bother? I’m thinking there are people out there growing luxurious nosestaches as we speak, with all kinds of styles from carefully trimmed bristles to full-blown waxed handlebars popping out of those nostrils and hidden from polite society behind a mask. Hey, don’t hate; people poke holes in their noses to stick in rings for some bizarre fashion sense, what with the attendant sideways snot blows when they sneeze, so we should all tolerate a few stray nose hairs. 
  • You are harder to recognize, thus making it harder to recognize anyone else. Therefore it is far easier to avoid people you don’t want to run into by pretending you don’t know who they are.
  • Masks are the great equalizer when it comes to people’s appearances. If you are not particularly attractive, nobody knows! We all look the same – unless you have an unfashionable mask, naturally. Talk about equality; you just don’t know whether you’re talking – from six feet apart – with some amazing Adonis or some grotesque, hideous hag.

Speaking of which, that’s all fine and good, but it’s not so great for handsome devils like me who have to hide our dazzling good looks from the masses. But, hey, we all have to make sacrifices.

Wake Up And Smell The Body Odor

Obliviousness (noun) – a state of being disregardful or unconscious of one’s surroundings, concerns or obligations; unmindful, unconscious, unaware; lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness.

If this describes you at certain times, then you are part of the human race. I know that I sometimes find myself daydreaming or running on autopilot or just plain not paying attention and do something inconsiderate to others in public, such as cutting some little old lady off in line at the grocery store (no, no, no, just kidding!).

But there are also those people who seem to be deliberately obtuse when it comes to human interaction in public places, people whose only excuse can be that their mamma didn’t raise them right. Because mine raised me to be considerate of others.

I started thinking about this the last time we journeyed to the beach, a place where you are on full display, so to speak, and should therefore be a bit more mindful of your actions. There we were, enjoying some sun, sand and solace from the world’s problems, when loud blaring music assaulted our ears. Why do people think the rest of us appreciate their taste, or lack thereof, in music?

What if we all, everyone on the beach or at the pool or in the park or wherever we are, turned up the volume on our tunes on our portable outdoor speakers? Would we all suddenly, sheepishly remember that, oh yeah, that is what earphones are made for? Or would we all engage in a cacophonous game of one-upmanship until we all went deaf?

You also notice obliviousness when people are trying to enter or exit somewhere in large quantities at the same time, such as a movie theater or concert hall (remember them?). As soon as people pass the portals, what do they do? They stop, oblivious to the people behind them, as they look around and get their bearings or chat with friends or decide they can’t wait one second more to check their messages on their phone.  

Even more of an annoyance these days is the lack of social distancing. It’s great most of us are finally on board with wearing masks in public during this pandemic, but what part of the six feet apart is so difficult to understand? Please don’t reach around me to grab a cucumber or a bag of chips just because you are in a hurry; back off a couple of steps and be patient. This would be a good time to check your messages on your phone.

Perhaps if we all stopped bathing regularly then body odor would act as a natural repellant and remind us all of the need to keep our distance. Hey, scary times call for drastic measures.

It’s often said that people sometimes are too much like sheep because they mindlessly do what they’re told and forget that they are supposed to think for themselves. But sheep also just walk around and eat whatever grass they can find, not caring if their baaing is too loud or they’re stepping on another sheep’s hooves or defecating on some grass that I had my eye on. 

So, please, stop being a sheep. Stop being an obliviant (I wish I’d made that up). Wake up, be aware, and start thinking about other people.

Don’t make me turn my music up.