These Are The Nights…

Or mornings that try women’s souls.  The nights that drag by, the nights that it seems I hear every clock tick in this marvelous world of battery operated clocks that in truth, don’t…  This is one of those nights that thoughts bounce around in my head like ping pong balls, one of those nights where my mind can’t really settle on one thing to lull myself to sleep with, instead I’m jerked like a fish on a hook from one thought  to the next.

How much iodine did we mix with baby oil back in the day when it was far from any doctor’s mind that tanning might not be really very good for your skin, much less the possibility of being lethal…?

Have I ever written about learning to ride a bike on my big sister’s bike?  The one that the seat was too high for me to sit on but I wanted to learn so badly to ride that I would stand on the pedals, my hands having to reach up above my shoulders to hold onto the handlebars…

Or about the times that we, my brother and the neighbor kids and I, would have ‘hoe-downs’ in the front yard that were nothing more than our mother’s prayers being answered that we were running off the excess energy before bedtime, wrestling or chasing fireflies to catch and put in a jar with holes carefully punched in the lid so we wouldn’t suffocate them, no matter that occasionally we would pinch their glowing butts off to make rings for our fingers or a pin on our t-shirts…

Maybe it was an evening for playing ‘statue’ when the bigger kids would whirl us around and then let our hands go and how we stopped we had to hold that position… until we were itchy from falling in the grass on sweaty summer evenings until we were called in for our baths before bedtime and how sweet and fresh the sheets smelled from being hung out on the clothesline to dry in the sunshine and summer breeze back in the day before clothes ‘dryers’ came to live in our basement.

Did I ever tell you that I could dribble a basketball one hundred  times without missing a beat before I was four or that my mom had her first heart attack the summer I was twelve and I thought for years it was my fault because I had been out playing all day and she didn’t know where I was?  Of course it was no different than any other summer day when my baby brother and me and the next door neighbor had been out riding our bikes, playing in our hideouts or walking to the neighborhood store three blocks away back when kids could walk to neighborhood stores but still I knew it had to be my fault…

Or about the crush I had on the cutest boy in the sixth grade class, a little blond/tow headed kid that right now I can’t remember his last name but I can remember riding bikes with around the school yard singing every song I could think of from the musical “Oklahoma” thinkin’ I could get him to fall in love with me even though I didn’t have a clue, though I thought I did, about what love really was… probably the very first crush I ever had on anyone that I can recall right now?

Or about the crush I had on my p.e. teacher the very next year that drove that little blond/tow-headed boy that had gone on to another school right out of my memory?  And did each and every one of us have a crush on our p.e. teacher or band teacher or English teacher no matter what sex they were?

Thinking about how Hallie loves weiners and how I love schnauzers and how wonderful it is to have all these differences that make us each so unique and to really enjoy the facets that make us all bright and shining stars in a universe, a galaxy, a milky way of personalities and how we find each other by such random ways in our different worlds…  A coincidence? The birds of a feather axiom?

All these thoughts and more… and it is now six in the morning, I’ve been to bed four times only to toss and turn, finally giving in and getting up to go read stuff on FaceBook or to play Farmville or Cafe World trying to lull myself into mind numbing stupidity to slow my brain down enough to finally fall asleep and, obviously since I’m typing this missile, it hasn’t worked and since I’m going to get my hair cut at nine I will just give up, plan on staying up and hopefully watching the sun that we haven’t seen in a day or three rise in the east only to be fighting sleep in the chair while getting my hair cut or, better yet, laying getting my hair washed and my scalp massaged and feeling totally pampered…

Or is all of this brought on by withdrawal from watching more butts that you could bounce a silver dollar off of during the past two weeks, glutes and pecs and traps that were hewn and cut by hours, weeks and years of a single pursuit, a focus and a direction that I never in my a.d.h.d. life ever knew for more than, oh, perhaps twelve minutes whether in pursuit of my next meal or Olympic Gold?

Or is this no more than the sleepless ravings of a feverish mind?

Who knows…?

The Shadow knows…

Who cares?

Hallie, when did you corner the market on Ambien and why won’t you share?