"Sleepless in Connecticut"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Sleepless in Connecticut”

February 27, 2021

 

“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”

                                                                                                                Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

 

Insomnia is not uncommon as we age. Bodies that have been functioning for several decades begin to show natural signs of wear. The brain hormone melatonin, which regulates the circadian rhythm that determines our sleep cycle, may become affected by age. Being neither a doctor nor a scientist, I don’t pretend to understand our internal workings. I experience them and marvel at them.

 

An Irish proverb says: “A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.” I like that advice. I laugh a good deal but do not always sleep well. I am not alone. James Hamblin wrote in the December 21, 2020 issue of The Atlantic: “Roughly three quarters of people in the United Kingdom have had a change in their sleep during the pandemic, according to the British Sleep Society.” (The Brits seem to have societies for every conceivable situation!) I suspect polls in the U.S. would show similar results. Back in September, the UC Davis Health Center issued an article headlined, “COVID-19 is wrecking our sleep with coronasomnia.” They cite the fact people, working from home, are up at “weird hours” and that we need “variety in our activities.” I am not up at weird hours, unless one counts those trips to the bathroom to satisfy nature’s call, but the pandemic haslimited the variety in my life. They (the UC Davis people) offer a lot of useful tips: keep a daily routine, avoid your smart phone before going to bed, get exercise, cut back on news and social media “especially in the evening,” go easy on alcohol and don’t nap.

 

I get the exercise I need, at least I think I do. I no longer listen to the evening news. (I read the morning papers.) I stay away from social media, which I don’t find especially social. Perhaps I do shut my eyes, or as a friend once said, “check my eyelids for holes,” for a few minutes in the early afternoon. A glass of wine or sherry is the extent of my drinking now. My iPhone does ding after I have turned off the lights, but that is usually a child or grandchild sharing a text message. I love hearing from them, so don’t want them to take me off their distribution list. Perhaps I should leave the phone in another room at night?

 

A habit my wife and I have developed since COVID-19 made its entrance a year ago is to slip between the covers and watch a movie before letting sleep take the reins. Our preference is for light fare – the Thin Man series, with William Powell and Myrna Loy; an old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical, like Top Hat or Swing Time; or a comedy with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, like Desk Set, or Adam’s Rib. Professionals advise against television in the bedroom, but it does not seem to me that old black and white movies emit much of the blue light that concerns them. However, there are evenings when we risk censure by watching newer detective series, like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, Inspector Morse (whose first name is Pagan!), or Inspector Maigret. These shows include some humor and little heart-thumping suspense. About half the time, I never make it to the end of the movie anyway. But that is the advantage of watching old favorites – one knows what one has missed, so it isn’t missed!

 

If I want to shut out the sound of the television or my wife’s questions, I roll to my left, with my bad right ear up. If feeling agreeable, I roll to the right so I can half-heartedly listen to the TV and grunt responses to my wife. E. Joseph Cossman, a one-time door-to-door salesman and mail-order entrepreneur, once wrote: “The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.” Easy to say, but harder to do when my eighty-year-old body is re-living its fifteen-year-old adolescence. Dale Carnegie advises us to get up and do something: “It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.”  So, I do. I get up, slip into another room and escape into a Trollope, a Wodehouse, or letters from E.B. White. My mind relaxes and my pulse rate subsides. If not reading something comforting, I might gather notes I had scribbled on a pad next to my bed and see if I can decipher what I had thought were so ingenious when I wrote them in the dark. 

 

When my head hits the pillow, my brain goes into overdrive. I think of luck, which plays a big part in all our lives. And I think of how lucky I have been, yet I have done nothing to be so blessed. I worry about COVID-19, and I worry about our government’s response to it. I worry about the amount of debt our state and nation carry, especially unfunded liabilities, and what the effect will be on markets, so important to our future well-being. I worry about the claim (ahistorical and unfounded, in my opinion) that we are a nation of systemic racists, of the slide in our nation’s cultural values and morals and how our grandchildren will cope in a world that combines Orwell’s 1984 with the meanness of a Senator Joseph McCarthy. I fear a “managed” economy will replace free market forces, thereby reducing everyone’s standard of living. And I know there is little I can do about any of this. On other nights, a kaleidoscopic album of childhood images races through my mind, causing me to think back on shameful things I have done and hurtful words I have uttered. I think of people I have upset, and opportunities I have missed, and I think of those I once loved who now are gone. While I know I am not alone in having these thoughts, I realize that one is never so alone as when enmeshed in childhood memories. 

 

And yet…If you know the scene from the 1950 movie Father of the Bride, with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, with the two of them in their separate beds. Tracy, as Stanley Banks, works himself into a lather, convinced his daughter’s fiancé, Buckley Dunstan, is a crook, a swindler perhaps even a kidnapper or murderer. With his rants, he wakes his wife. Having released his emotions he falls asleep, leaving Ellie Banks to silently stew over the concerns her husband passed on to her. 

 

So, I feel like Stanley. Thanks for reading. I am batter for getting these anxieties off my chest and will sleep soundly tonight. I hope I have not upset you.