Sleep Tight

Last week, the kids got sick. Then they gave it to me and I got sick, too.

Now, this really never happens. I never get sick. I am immune to everything! But this thing the kids found and dragged home last week, it even took me down. Our fevers climbed so high that music turned architectural and our iphones looked like blurs.

What else could I do? I tucked the kids into bed and I pulled up a chair and told them stories.

I told them stories I’d written (and some that I’d stolen) and I described worlds I’d made (and some I’d visited), and I gave them the sorts of warnings that good parents give their children at one time or another growing up.

One of the things was a story and a world and a warning all in one.

This is how it went:

I Believe in Everything; Nothing is Sacred

Strangers send me messages. It happens all the time.

Every morning, I wake. I stretch. Then I just lie there in the dark to see how long I can lie there. In the dark. Lie there NOT checking my messages.

It’s all about discipline.

Sometimes I go a whole minute. Sometimes two. I hold out for as long as I can and when I finally give in, there they are. Sometime in the night, strangers have sent me messages. Again.

The people I know hardly ever bother with me, but these strangers? They really seem to care.

Some are sending me grammar corrections for the blog. Some just want to share the music they’re listening to. Recipes. Rumors. Photographs to turn me straight. I get damned to hell at least one time every week.

There’s an Elvis impersonator in Ohio who links me to clips of all his shows and a girl in Tallahassee needs help coming out to her mom. This one guy sends me pages and pages of angry emails. Every day. Without fail. He calls me a slut and tells me I am going to pay for what I’ve done.

Keep in mind these are strangers. 

Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams

Even though I know I shouldn’t, I’ve started to worry about what my next girlfriend is going to like about me.

Waiting for Alex Trebek

My great grandfather – my father’s mother’s dad, who we call “Papa” – turns ninety-three this week.

I visit Papa a lot, every week in fact, which is a lot to visit a ninety-three year old great grandfather who never speaks and rarely moves and only lives to watch a tv game show called “Jeopardy.”

He lies in a hospital bed in his bedroom with three pillows under his head and the rose-print bedspread pulled all the way up around his neck. And his body is so withered and so thin that the bedspread covering him looks perfectly flat. He doesn’t even make a ripple. So every week, when I walk in to visit him, he looks like just a head sitting there on a pillow, all by itself, smiling.

You can go ahead and laugh but it is an unsettling sight to see.