Late to Bed, Late to Rise

One milestone on the road to maturity and adulthood is when sleeping in becomes more attractive than staying up late.  Steph is at choir practice tonight, and once it’s over she joins several of her fellow singers for pizza in Worthington, so this is the night when she and I stay up the latest.  (Susie has been in bed since 9.)

Staying up late was a rare treat for me when I was a child.  I think the first time that I was allowed awake past my usual 8:30 bedtime was to see the fireworks on Independence Day 1969.  We drove to the Washington County Fairgrounds and sat in the infield bleachers sweating buckets and being eaten alive by mosquitos past the promised start time of 10 p.m.  The first rocket went up around 10:30.

The second time was later that month, when I was allowed to stay up to watch Neil Armstrong of Apollo XI step from the lunar module onto the surface of the moon.  (VCRs were still quite a ways in the future, so my parents took pictures of the TV screen, with headings such as FIRST LIVE PICTURES FROM MOON).

I didn’t have a set bedtime after my parents separated, once I was living alone with my dad and my mother was in Harding Hospital, a rich persons’ mental hospital in Worthington.  Mother was so cruelly restrictive that I don’t think Dad had the heart to deny me anything or set limits, plus he was away most evenings at my stepmother-to-be’s apartment that I would usually be in bed by the time he got home.

During junior high weekends, I usually gathered together bottles of pop and junk food and watched the All Night Theatre, broadcast from WSAZ-TV, Channel 3 in Huntington, W.Va., and became a fairly decent amateur critic of B movies.

Venturing out of doors after dark was something I rarely did, and almost never alone.  I have a totally out-of-context memory of a time when I was in pre-school, walking with my mother to our landlord’s house at night.  (The house where I lived until age six was behind our landlord’s house, so their back door faced our front, with a large yard in between.)  I remember laughing my head off because I was in my pajamas (I even remember they were yellow, zip-up, and had footies) and it was nighttime.  I even remember the moon behind the steeple of Christ United Methodist Church, less than a block away.

When I was 12, two boys and I camped out in one of our back yards fairly frequently in the summer.  Sleep rarely entered into this equation.  Once all the lights were out in our host’s house, we would tiptoe out and wander around Marietta.  I remember the three of us sitting on the steps under the light of Mills Hall, the math and physics classroom building at Marietta College, and talking (mostly misinformation about sex) for hours.  Another thing I remember is when we were walking in the neighborhood of Washington School, and we saw a very drunk guy hiccuping as he staggered down Fifth Street and rounded the corner onto Washington Street, in front of the First Church of Christ, Scientist.  The Pepsi-Cola clock in the window of Riddle’s Restaurant said 2:45.

That was usually the extent of our predawn forays, and we never stole or vandalized anything.  The closest we came to that was one night when we found several steel pipes lying in the street.  We picked them up and, with the dexterity and finesse of a discus thrower or a baton twirler, we threw them down the street, watching blue sparks shoot up from the brick streets each time a pipe struck them.  Several bedroom lights came on, so we disappeared before anyone could call the police.

I have had several third- and swing-shift jobs in my working life, most notably at The Harvard Crimson, the IRS, and the post office.  I sometimes felt resentment when I was on the bus, en route to these late-night jobs, knowing that others on the bus were headed to nightclubs, movies, and parties.  The payoff came when I was headed home from work, because most of the people on the bus were headed to work or school, and I was headed to bed.

Usually, both Steph and I are in bed before 10, and I’m grateful for it, and the Seroquel and Sinemet usually manage to knock me out, at least initially.  (Staying asleep is quite another matter.)  There are nights, though, when I don’t get to sleep right away, when I feel like the little kid excited at being out at night.  I’ll lie there in bed and hear the bus go by, or hear the music from the bar up the street, and feel the same way I did when I had an early bedtime in the summer, and could hear kids my age playing outside.

On another subject, I’m sorry to report that Susie did not get a role in Honk, Jr.  She is taking the news in stride, and is focusing her energy on the Spring Choir Concert at church.