Something
curious is happening to me. I hope it’s
not anything to be too concerned about. I’m not napping as much as I used to. For most of my life, if I was on the couch
watching a TV show, I’d nod off within five minutes. But a couple of weeks
back, I made it through the entire Super Bowl wide awake. Not even Peyton Manning can say that.
This past month
I did not take a single nap. Even the dog wondered what happened to our siesta.
He kept following me around the house as if to say, “Hey, I’m 80 in dog years.
It’s almost 2 p.m. Let’s stretch out and do this.”
Napping has
never been a problem. When I was a high school teacher, I actually fell asleep
in class while proctoring a statewide exam. The kids were very polite. “I hope
we didn’t disturb you yesterday, Mr. Wolfsie,” said one of my students. “We
tried to cheat as quietly as we could.”
Up until
recently, I could take a quick snooze while having dinner with friends, at red
lights, while waiting for my wife to put on makeup, as the dog was relieving
himself, at fast food drive-up windows, in check-out lines. Anywhere.
As a result of
grabbing the occasional 40 winks, I have missed a few events that in retrospect
I probably should have stayed awake for. Here are the top three:
1. My sixty-fifth birthday party (I wish they had screamed
“surprise!” louder)
2. Paris
3. The end of my
interview with Governor Evan Bayh
Mary Ellen never
quite understood the value of a nap. Personally, I think women are afraid
they’re going to miss something. Like a sale, or a beautiful sunset, or the
plot of a movie. Men don’t care about stuff like this. On the rare occasion that Mary Ellen has
fallen asleep during the day, she would awaken with an apology and an
explanation of her behavior. “I don’t know what happened. I must be coming down
with something!” I always had a different attitude when awakening from a short
slumber: “Man, that was a great. I’m getting better and better at this all the
time.”
My inability to
nap recently came up during my last annual physical, but there was some
confusion in the conversation. “How are you sleeping?” asked Dr. Coss, a pretty
standard inquiry by a primary care provider.
“It’s been
rough,” I told him. “Sometimes I’m awake for 8-10 hours in a row.”
“TEN HOURS?” he
gasped. “We need to do some testing. How long has this been going on?”
“Several
months.”
“Do you just
toss and turn in bed?”
“Well, I’m not
in bed. That’s the problem. I’m out driving the car, watching the news, cooking. Sometimes I’m in the garage operating heavy
machinery.”
“This is very
troubling, Dick. So you don’t sleep all night?
“No, I sleep
great at night. It’s all day that I can’t sleep”
Dr. Coss was
very helpful once I straightened out the misunderstanding. He said that I had
to accept that men experience changes in their bodily rhythms as they mature. “I
want you to go home this afternoon and really think about that,” he said. I
told him I’d have to sleep on it. Which
meant, of course, it would have to wait until that night.
The problem is
that there are now three more hours each day where I need to find something to
keep me busy. I think I have found the perfect online service to do just that.
It must really work, or they couldn’t call it Napster.
