A Connoisseur of Sleep and Waking

The bears are right to listen to the body's wisdom. Not like me, whom the dog awakens too early on winter mornings, and I obey – not her, precisely, but the economic necessity of waking despite my body's every impulse to cling to sleep.

Oh, but the bears in their wisdom! In the fall, they cram their mouths with berries until the juice is dripping down the outside of their jaws. They scoop salmon up out of cold streams and eat them whole and raw, and chilled as if they were lifted straight from beds of crushed ice, and slake their thirst from these streams. They fatten and sate themselves. Just think of the vitamins and minerals their bodies ingest! Then they seek out lairs deep in the earth where no-one can find them, and wrap themselves in fur blankets, slow their heartbeats, and sleep for a whole season.

In the past several years, I have become a connoisseur of sleep.

There is depressed sleep, which I recommend to no-one, a craving for bed so irresistible that it is like a paralysis. When I give in, I can stay there for days and weeks.

There is, on the other hand, the sleep of physical and mental exhaustion after having worked steadily and well. This is a delicious, earned sleep. Sometimes, it brings dreams, and these dreams are welcome.

Once I knew about post-coital slumber, but I have mostly forgotten. It takes a naïve and reckless trust, a misplaced trust, to continue to allow yourself to fall into a deep sleep in the arms of a man that has turned mean on you outside of bed. I continued to sleep beside my husband, and even in his arms, for many years after he had become dangerous. It took me a long, long time to feel the fear and take it very seriously.

On an issue related to sleep, unlike bears that stock up on nourishment and take a whole winter to sleep it off, and unlike my dog, who is a regular eater of balanced meals, I am a social eater. I, too, would have strong bones and teeth and glossy fur if I followed my dog's regime, but for lack of regular human society at mealtimes, I have become an occasional eater. I can go for days without hunger, and forget to eat.

Then one morning, I will wake up ravenous, and gnaw whatever happens to be left in the refrigerator that, in these years, I have taken to replenishing only when the last morsel has been eaten. So there will be a corner of hard cheese or a slice of bread or a carrot or banana or the last spoonful from the peanut-butter jar.

Last week, the dog woke me and, after I had emerged grumpily from the down comforter into the cold and dark apartment and let her out into the yard, I opened the refrigerator and discovered it to hold a single pita. In the time it took for the dog to pee, and scratch the door to be readmitted – less, in fact – I had a fragrant, chewy, hot pita to take back to my lair. The dog was puzzled: first I held the pita, like an edible hot-water bottle, to the flannel of my tummy, and then I held it to the base of my skull (the migraine points), and only then, when feeling sufficiently warm and relaxed, did I begin to eat. Well, you see, I was experimenting with a comfortable way of waking. But the dog became aroused, and rooted with her snout underneath the comforter, all along its edge, so that I had to share that meal.

This morning, I again remembered to be hungry upon waking and letting the dog out, and a cold, dark morning it was. I discovered a russet potato in the vegetable bin. As I have said, I am a social eater without regular society, and perhaps for this reason have become a no-nonsense cook; 5-minute, 1-course meals are my specialty.

I washed the potato, sliced a triangular plug into the top, poured olive oil inside the carved-out space, sprinkled a pinch of basil, and replaced the plug. Within five minutes, the potato was nuked to perfection, its tissues saturated with olive oil and basil. The dog doesn't like potatoes and, curling up on her blanket and pillow beside the bed for another snooze, left me to breakfast on it alone beneath the covers. After which, warm from the inside and outside and yearning to be a bear, I too went back to sleep.

I wish I could give you a less quirky picture of my life, but this is the truth of it.

Anchorage

This weekend has marked the 20th anniversary of my father's death. I have realized that if I keep this awareness balled inside my throat and pooling heavily behind my eyeballs, where it has been since first I crawled into bed two days ago, I will hide under the covers for another few hours or even days.

My father had dark eyes and, in his younger days, dark hair. He smelled deliciously of shaving cream. He remained physically strong all his years, and was soft spoken and kind, a mixture of the masculine and feminine. I call this quality the mother in men, and all my adult life, my radar has been alive to it.

If my father had lived, he would be over a hundred years old today. He would not have wanted to live so long. He was proud of his physical strength and beauty and would not have wanted to become frail.

My father died believing that I had married a man who could be counted on to cherish and protect me forever. I thought so, too.

I am glad that my father did not live to see my life disintegrate.

I am glad that my father did not live to see the charming young man I married become a bully. My young man was the selfish son of a selfish mother, and there is no great leap from selfishness to cruelty. Put one foot in front of the other and you are there.

Yet now that my abuser is out of my life, I live so precariously in socioeconomic terms that even the metaphor of walking a tightrope without a safety net does not begin to express it. In my married years, I was like the cartoon character obliviously walking on air; then one day it looks down and, abruptly realizing its predicament, wildly paddles its paws or webbed feet as it plummets. Squaaawk.

I am ashamed by my failure to have achieved the security and happiness my father wished for me. Because that's all he wished. The long-ago college graduation and wedding ceremonies, so pretty and hopeful, were for him only icing on the cake. It was personal joy and a safe anchorage in the big world that he wished for his daughter, and which these ceremonies seemed to guarantee.

My father was an intelligent and resilient man, though, with a capacity for appreciating nuance that his own hard life would have taught him. I have no safe anchorage, Daddy, but perhaps, finally, I am coming to your wisdom of taking each day as a gift.