Sleepy Boy

The older I've gotten, the more I love to sleep (perchance to dream? you bet!).

I remember that my maternal grandparents took afternoon naps. I thought there was something wrong with them.

Not long before my father died (Nov. 30, 1999--he was 86), he told me that he loved being asleep. I (clueless) wondered why that was so. He told me: "Because I'm young again."

When he woke up, you see, he was Rip Van Winkle: He was in his bed--or wheelchair (he loved to nap therein)--and could do virtually none of the things he'd always loved to. Except watch football games on TV (oh, did he love doing that!) and eat from a jar of dry-roasted peanuts. (He would eat only one or two at a time--showing self-control--until the entire jar was gone: fewer calories, eating like that.)

Now in my mid-seventies I'm finding I understand more and more what my father meant. Because of my age--and because of one of the meds I'm on--I get tired far more quickly than I used to. I can't ride a bike anymore (I gave it away to a former student last fall); I can't play wiffleball with my grandsons (I took a terrible fall the last time I tried it--this past Memorial Day); I can't run (vertigo--I used to run 4-6 miles/day); I can't hop in the car and drive to Oregon; I can't ...

But asleep? I can do all those things--sometimes even better than I actually did them!

And now that I'm retired, opportunities to sleep abound. In fact, I have to battle the urge to head for the bed during the day--especially during the time (mid-afternoon) that I've set aside to head out to the health club, where I ride an exercise bike, walk a mile of not-so-fast laps, "ride" the rowing machine, do some curls in the weight area. These days, I hate every second of exercising--a thought that the Younger Me would not have believed--the Younger Me who biked and ran and played basketball and baseball and tennis and ... whatever.

A few years ago I stumbled across--then memorized--this short poem by Mary Oliver (1935-2019--a native of Maple Heights, OH), a poem that, for the Me of Now, says it all:

I love that--"the gift of forgetfulness gracious and kind": says it all

And pretty soon--in about ten minutes or so--I will head upstairs and take my late-morning nap, whose restorative powers, I hope, will convince me I've got enough whup-ass in me to head out to the health club later today.