Nature’s alarm clock
Iam a big advocate of naps. Sleep, in general, is one of my favorite things. There is something more attractive about napping than sleeping at night. Maybe it’s because it’s during the daytime and there is an element of taboo to it.
Not everyone has time for a nap. It’s a luxury. The older I get though, the harder it is for me to really sleep when I take a nap. Lately, I just lay there with my eyes closed and listen to the annoying symphony of leaf blowers and barking dogs in my neighborhood and dream of sinister ways to silence them.
Sometimes when I am taking a nap or sleeping in on a weekend, my wife or son will come in and wake me up for whatever selfish reason. Then I’ll get up and get cranky and my wife will say, “you weren’t even asleep,” and most of the time when she says that, she is accurate.
She knows that when I am really asleep and she wakes me up I violently flinch. Then, when I suddenly come back to consciousness, she asks me why I always wake up like that, as if I’m some kind of weirdo. Well, I am a weirdo, but that has nothing to do with why I am such a jumpy bundle of nerves.
High school was about the time that I really got into napping. As a kid, I would fight naps with all my being, but in high school, I fell in love with the professional nap.
A professional nap is not your average Sunday recliner or sofa nap. A professional nap is a complete, pants off, under the covers with the fan on full blast nap. The only difference between night sleep and a professional nap is that they are usually shorter and you don’t have to wake up in the middle of them and go to the bathroom. In the case of teenaged me, they are also much, much deeper.
My family had a very strict rule about eating dinner together and on time every single night. We were pretty liberal with many other things, but if your fanny wasn’t in that seat at 6 p.m. to eat your carrot sticks and bunless hot dog, burnt grilled cheese, or “untidy Joseph” (sloppy Joes) then there would be hell to pay. I found this out the hard way.
My routine those days was to come home from school, maybe eat something, and immediately get to work on taking a professional nap. I was usually the only one in the house, it was nice and quiet, and I’d immediately be off to dreamland.
The first few times I missed dinner I was cut some slack because I was a growing kid, but after a while, this insubordination really started to irritate my father. He insisted I set an alarm. I did, but I started sleeping so deeply that not even that would wake me up. Then the old man took matters into his own hands.
The first thing he did to wake me up was pulling all the covers off me. This would wake me up by freezing, since the fan was always on high. But I adapted. The next thing he used was cold water, which certainly did the trick of jolting me out of bed — but depending on the amount used, the bed was still soaked when it was time for actual sleep and that caused all kinds of other problems.
The solution came as summer waned one year, in the form of a creature that was from then on referred to as nature’s alarm clock. I was so deep into a slumber that I probably could have been pronounced dead. All of a sudden I was woken to one of the shrillest sounds I have ever heard. Right in front of my face were two of my dad’s meaty fingers holding a freshly molted, screaming cicada plucked off of a tree.
Sure the creepy-looking bugs sound enchanting when they are in a chorus high in a tree, but right in front of one’s face, they are one of the loudest natural sounds on Earth. And to give the cicada more inspiration to scream, the old man slowly waved a lit cigarette around its abdomen, cackling with evil joy.
I assure you no insects were harmed when this event occurred, at least not physically. But I never took another nap during my high school tenure.
Even with my pants off, wrapped up in covers on a rainy day, fan going at hurricane speed, I have a hard time drifting off. I continue to be an advocate of sleep, I just wish I could get a nap without jolting awake for fear of a terrifying bug screaming from its abdomen into my face.