By Steve Brody
Published Sep 19, 2005 12:54
You, the raccoon-eyed, wake up. I feel your pain, as a former president, a famously sleepless nocturnal type, would say.
We start early here at the New Era. The first editors and reporters trickle in about 4:30 a.m., and sometimes I am among them. Most days, like the others, I get in about 6:30 a.m., still quite early for this former night owl.
Always the 4 or 5 a.m. wake-up looms, the bleating reveille of the alarm clock. Budgeting enough time for sleep is almost a part of this job. Six, seven, eight hours — how much is enough? The experts tell us we need eight a night. You’ll feel better, look better, think clearer, you won’t mix up “its” and “it’s,” they say. I’d like to yawn right in they’re (sic) faces.
Do I go to bed in broad daylight, before babies and my 80-something grandparents?
Show me a man who sleeps soundly for eight hours a night, and I’ll show you a man who’s less than gainfully employed.
And we need to be gainfully employed, to pay for all the sleep aids we apparently require. Americans spend tens of billions of dollars a year on them, according to various estimates. Prescription pills with names like Comadoz, Somnolol and Lullabioxx; pillows and mattresses engineered by NASA; high thread count sheets dusted with Chinese herbs; recordings of waves, crickets, Alan Greenspan — you name it, we’ll pay handsomely for it. Sleep is a luxury, indeed.
If sleep is big business, it is serious business, too. I remember a commercial for Time-Life Books on the Old West, in which the voice-over narration tells us Billy the Kid — I think — shot a man for snoring too loud. The Kid wasn’t a morning person, apparently.
When I was a teenager and hadtrouble falling asleep at night, my dad offered a novel but ineffective remedy.
“Count naked cheerleaders,” he said.
That was easy for him to say. He had his own over-the-counter sleep aid: Canadian Mist, on the rocks.
Even now, whenever I hear the tinkle of ice in glasses, I think of his footfalls on the stairway, glass in hand, going up to his bedroom to join my mom, who was already fast asleep, having run after four boys all day. Soon enough I’d hear his snoring as I lay, frustrated, trying to visualize girls frolicking without their pom-poms.
Of course, sleep is a euphemism, too. Americans seem to have a bottomless desire to know who in Hollywood is sleeping with whom, and it isn’t celebrities’ slumber habits we want to know.
The fascination, if less prurient, goes all the way to the White House. We’ve been told that this president is a man with a strict sleep schedule. Early to bed, early to rise. Sure, he’s healthy, as far as we know. Wealthy, too. Wise? That is for other columnists to judge.
All this is not a complaint, not a lament for lost sleep. After a couple of years here at the New Era, I am becoming accustomed to the early hours.
Driving to work, I see, through half-closed eyes, that I’m not the only early riser. The predawn streets of downtown Lancaster are dotted with people, even if at a glance some appear to be extras from a George Romero movie, giving new meaning to “graveyard shift.”
Like me, they’re just trying to get to work or to get home, I’m sure, and probably don’t have time to drag me from my car and gnaw out my brain.
The other day, a neighbor who had to catch a very early bus the next morning asked me what the secret was to waking up at 4 a.m.
I yawned and told him the truth: “Fear of getting fired.”
(The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.)
