Late
“After all, he said to himself, it’s probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
-Ernest Hemingway
It is after midnight, but early. As a child, my mother would put me to bed promptly at 8:30, and because I was afraid, she would leave the hall light on, and my bedroom door open. Looking back, I don’t know how I slept those nights; today it is impossible for me to sleep with even the slightest bit of light in the room. The door must be closed too, and unless I am near the point of exhaustion, noise is a distraction as well, a claw that snags at the thread of my sleep and keeps me tethered to the world, awake.
Perhaps I am being overly profound, some noises can become part of the routine of sleep; the low hum of the air conditioner and the gentle up and down of the elevator are two examples of sounds that lull me to sleep now. While I love sleep (who doesn’t), I don’t love the idea of sleep. I have an aversion to lying down before 1:30 or 2 in the morning, and although I always regret it the next day, I have yet to change my sleeping habits. The problem is that there is so much left undone at the end of a day, so much has yet to be achieved. How can anyone, I often wonder, lie down to sleep each night and go down without a fight? Of course, the reality is that life is slow and steady, and that it takes many days, weeks, nights, years and decades even before each little item on one’s laundry list has been sufficiently checked. Everyone can find something to keep them awake at night, although I wouldn’t recommend actively looking for something.
My nighttime routine as a child was simple. My mother would put my sister to bed and then she would come into my room, which I shared with my brother. She would come in looking tired, her hands chaffed and worn from too many years washing dishes. We would say our prayers together, in unison, first the Our Father, next the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and finally we’d pray for all our cousins and aunts and uncles and our Grandma Heffernan “in Heaven.” This was our routine, and my brother and I clung to it as an essential part of the day. If my mother was out for some reason, we would get angry with our father, who had left the Catholic church and become a Presbyterian, and couldn’t remember the words to the Hail Mary.
“No Daddy,” we’d say, “that’s wrong.”
He also didn’t know the exact way we prayed for all our relatives, and although he tried his best, he could never recite it word for word the way my mother did. Daddy knew how to play, we decided, and how to make money, but when it came to bathing us, or praying, he was a lost cause.
But when my mother was there, all went smoothly and we were able to sleep soundly, knowing we had fulfilled our nightly ritual, we had touched base with God, and all was as it should be.
Some nights, though, I would stay awake long after my brother had fallen asleep. I would stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars and comets my mother had stuck on the ceiling above my bed. I slept on the top bunk, and so I could reach out and touch them, wonder how God saw them, from above, how it looked to my grandmother in Heaven.
I would get up and stand in the doorway, call out to my mother, who was always awake, and who still doesn’t sleep. She was always disdainful at first.
“Tommy, why are you awake? Get back in bed.”
Then her face would soften, and she would bend down and let me sit on her knee. She was strong, I thought, and wise. I would notice her hands, rough and dry, stubborn and unlike the hands of other women. And her eyes too, were different. No eye shadow, none of the soft blue or green that marked the others.
“Is there a Heaven?” I would ask. “Is there a Heaven, really?”
“Of course there is,” she’d say. “Someday we’ll both be there.”
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