MID-NIGHT RAMBLINGS

The blurry red numbers on the alarm clock just silently announced that it is 3:12 AM on this Wednesday morning. Since I haven’t put my glasses on I need to squint mightily to bring the numbers into focus. I can’t sleep. My dear wife breathes the breath of quiet and righteous dreams here beside me. The road noise on the nearby highway is surprisingly loud and active for this usually peaceful hour.

When I can’t sleep I get up and head out to the living room, stopping for a brief visit to the bathroom. A quick scan of the street through the front windows reveals that all is quiet, as it should be. Then I go to the kitchen for a glass of water and a couple of Tylenol. I wander around the dark house for a while waiting for the Tylenol to ease the usual aches and pains.

Then I decide that it would be a good idea to go into the family room and sit down at the computer. Flipping on the light I log on and check the email. Nothing is there so I check in at Facebook. Not surprisingly nothing is happening on the site. Normal folks are sleeping. So I log off the internet and bring up the word processing program. I stare at the white screen for a while. Then I look at a couple of the things that I’m working on that are on hold for various reasons. No new ideas to move these pieces along come to mind so I go back to a blank screen.

These are the hours of the night when thoughts can easily stray to the big questions of life. What does it all mean? How much time do I have left? Is God listening? Why should he? I’m probably boring Him with this kind of crap. So tonight I’m resisting the deep and dark, moody and angst filled pondering. But when I try to think of some amusing little story to tell I come up blank. My poetic muse is equally silent. This sucks. Some nights I can knock out a story or a couple of pieces of poetry and in the process get tired enough to go back to bed and sleep for a couple more hours.

So I grab one of he books I’m reading this week. I need something interesting enough to keep my mind focused but dull enough to tire me out fairly quickly. “A Brief History of Canada” is my choice. I’m at the part where the English have taken over the Canadian colonies from France and the French folks are really pissed and scared at the same time. Nothing much has changed up there in two hundred and fifty years or so. About the time the English have backed off on trying to make all those Frenchies into tea drinking, umbrella carrying replicas of the folks back in London, I realize that my ancestors, who came ashore with Samuel Champlain and stayed on, were probably veterans of the wars between the French and English. Fancy that. Those old time Boureys, LaDukes, Messiers and Dumases might have been involved in the stuff being described in this history book. I checked the index to see if any of the names are in there but they aren’t. Of course this is a “Brief History” so a lot more pages would be required to handle the exploits of my forefathers and foremothers. And it was only fifty or so years after that time that the ancestors headed down into the USA. Also knowing my various genetic inheritances I can assume that those people were probably more of the foot soldiers, farmers and woodsmen types than the officers and aristocrats of the era, which is not a bad thing but no riches devolved from that lineage.

Well the eyelids are getting heavy again and I think I can head back to the bed. As long as my dear wife hasn’t slid into a deep and sonorous snoring mode I should be able to sleep for a while. If that’s happened I might as well start frying up the bacon and eggs.

One more stop in the bathroom (older guys are very conscious of this necessity) and back to the sack. It’s 4:03 AM. I drift off into dreamless darkness hoping that you all…

Have a fine day.