My daughter was going to be gone for the weekend. The bright spot in this was the fact that in the middle of the night, no one would be crawling over my head to get to the other side of my bed, or poking me and whispering urgently, "MAMA!", or jumping on the snoring monster in my bed. For the most part, I am able to ignore and sleep through those sorts of interruptions, but that last one was especially scary and it hurt, too. I was looking forward to sleeping until the morning sunlight, or semblance of it, danced around my room, and I could luxuriously stretch from one corner to its diagonal opposite without encountering any small limbs, or raising the ire of a small sleeping child. In short, I couldn't wait to go to bed and stay there for a really long time.
Before my daughter left, we had emptied some things out of the car, in preparation for the weekend soccer game, shopping trip, etc. You know how the car gets after a week of frantic running. One thing that I took into the house was a box that had been in the car since the road trip (see Three Mules Abreast). It contained the AAA travel books for Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Arizona, as well as the corresponding maps. As the box was not totally overflowing, I had stuffed a couple of random items in it from the back seat. This may or may not have included a jump rope, a cell phone that didn't work, a deck of cards, some candy wrappers, and a thing that I can only describe as part calculator, part electronic demon. This box was part of the mountain of things that I brought into the house on Friday afternoon, and it landed in a temporary spot in the hallway, outside my bedroom door.
My Friday night plan consisted of eating enough chicken nuggets to make me full, correcting tests, and drinking Mike's Pink Lemonade. I only achieved two of the above action items. However, I did them extremely well. I tried really hard to stay awake for the entire 2 hour special of Prime Time, but as always, I fell asleep and didn't learn how the woman in New Mexico killed her mechanic husband. I knew she had done it from the beginning, because whenever they interviewed her, it was a super-close-up shot of her face, so as to hide her prison uniform. By the time Prime Time was over at 11:00, I was alert again, proud to have detected that it was the wife that did the guy in, but disappointed to have missed the gory details.
After completing my evening ablutions, I snuggled happily into my flannel sheets and grabbed a book from the nightstand. I read for a while until I realized that I was reading with my eyes closed. This is a frequent phenomenon that happens to me, and I may have also mentioned it in a previous post, Sleep Becomes Me. The story was going along quite nicely, until I realized that I was one of the characters and about to come to a bad end. At that point I gave up trying to read and I turned out the lights, looking forward to unlimited, and uninterrupted, sleep.
Imagine my discomfort and confusion when I awoke at o-dark-thirty, to a tinny, obviously battery-operated rendition of The William Tell Overture, by Gioachino Rossini. You may know it better as the theme song from the Lone Ranger radio and TV shows. Gioachino will roll over in his grave when he discovers that his musical picture of life in the Swiss Alps has been programmed into a calculator, battery-operated, electronic tool of the devil. The odd thing is that even at that hour, I clearly and precisely knew that the name of the offending tune was the William Tell Overture, and that it was coming from that box outside my bedroom door. I covered my head with pillows. The finale penetrated the synthetic down blockade. The sound was like the buzz of a mosquito, piercing my brain. I convinced myself that it would come to an end, but it tirelessly started up again. This process repeated itself for what seemed like hours. I knew that if I got up to turn it off, I would not resume my relished slumber. I also knew that I would be rendered senseless if I had to listen to it until the morning sunlight danced around my room. With this music, the sunlight would gallop.
With what I am sure was a heavy, disgusted sigh, I heaved myself out of bed and fumbled toward the doorway. Without contacts, and at that hour, I was not at my light-footed best. I rifled through the box, throwing maps here and books there. Grabbing the devil's device, I stabbed at it with my finger, squinting through the dark, jabbing every possible button that I could detect. The sound stopped and the welcome sound of the silence roared in my ears. Throwing the offending instrument down, I took two large steps back to my bed and thankfully slid in. I closed my eyes. William Tell and his cavalry charged through my head, circled around and came at me again. I opened my eyes. The morning light had snuck in while I was fighting William Tell. "Roll over Gioachino, it's time to get up", I grumbled.
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