TO SLEEP – PERCHANCE

Sleep and I have a very tenuous relationship. We haven't seen eye to eye for many years. Being in my mid–late 60's (no need to be too precise), I figured it was time to try and locate the root of my problem, so I decided to do some research. “Why not?” I thought. “I'm awake anyway.” The journey took me back a few generations in my own family. My great grandfather, who we knew as grandfather, a name given him by my mother, his granddaughter, rarely ever slept. Tales have been handed down about how he would sit up all night long, translating volumes from English to Russian to Hebrew to Yiddish and back again. He didn't even speak all of those languages, but at 3am, in a little room in his house, who the hell knew? He was an old man and we all believed him. “Grandfather, what are all these squiggly lines?” I would ask whenever I would visit and snoop around where I didn't belong. “Oh, that's Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” in Russian,” he would say. Or, that's Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” in Hebrew.” We lived in Connecticut and that made it much easier for me to swallow. In fact it, at 8 years old, I bought it....hook, line and sinker. The fact that it was nothing escaped me completely. He was suffering from insomnia and spent the late night/early morning hours doodling. His son, my grandfather, who I also referred to as Grandfather, couldn't sleep either. He would try, as the original Grandfather had, to nod off into dreamland, but spent most of his 89 years sitting awake, reading manuscripts that his father had translated from English to Russian to Hebrew to Yiddish and back again. It never occurred to him that there was really nothing written on these pages but a bunch of squiggly lines that his father had passed off as languages that existed outside the borders of Connecticut. My grandfather was an extremely bright man who, apparently always believed what his father told him, proving that intelligence and gullibility can, indeed, coexist. He must have read Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee.....” hundreds of times in myriad nondescript languages. The fact that he was really just reading gibberish never took away from his enjoyment of this wonderful tale. My father didn't sleep either and he was from an entirely different family than the aforementioned father and son grandfather team. We aren't sure if his father suffered from insomnia. He died young and never had the opportunity to walk around in a sleep deprived haze during the day. The theory is that my father married into the issue and knew what he was getting into when he met my mother, who also suffers this dreaded malady. She figures, after doing all the appropriate math, that she has slept a total of two to three weeks in her 87 years. It looks as though the trait is less a treatable disease than it is a genetic condition. My brother doesn't sleep any better than any of the other family members who are so well acquainted with the night. Even as a little boy, he would wander around our bedroom in the dark, bumping into things, eventually nodding off standing straight up with his head leaning on a dresser. I know because I would lay awake in bed watching him in the hopes that this late night entertainment would help send me off into dreamland. Every once in a while it would work and I have a faint memory of waking up refreshed after a good two or three hour slumber. It was rare, but, if I remember correctly, quite a treat. As for me.....I am no different from the rest of the “kin folk,” but I have a routine. It seems to me that I once read somewhere that routines can make you sleepy. My wife has to get up very early to work, so she goes to bed at about 10pm. That's when I get out my laptop, plug in the headphones and watch 50's TV shows in the hopes that they will put me to sleep. They normally don't. It seems that I always have to see how the Lone Ranger and Tonto get the bad guys in these episodes that I have seen over and over for the past 60 years. You'd think I'd remember how they did it. At about 1am, I turn off the computer and turn over and close my eyes. By 2:15 or so, I have to get up to pee and I can't go back to sleep, so I go downstairs and turn on the TV, where I can usually find an old episode of The Lone Ranger or two. When I realize that I just watched it a couple of hours earlier and I remember how they rounded up the Cavendish gang, I try my hand at translating Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” in the time tested tradition of my now long departed family members. I suppose I can call the marks that I am making on the paper in my wee hours stupor any language that I want. I just hope my kids will buy it when they are grown and wide awake in the middle of the night, so they can enjoy the fruits of Mark Twain's and my labors and appreciate what their elders have, so lovingly handed down to them.