Trying to make sense of it all

The end of May already? What the heck? What in the world is going on anyway?

Maybe it’s something else altogether. Some mystic force out there messing with the moon. The tides. The energy that surrounds us. I ask myself why I can’t sleep at night. Was it too much tea too late in the afternoon? Is it all the random thoughts that I can’t shake as I try desperately to will myself to sleep?

Then I hear no one’s sleeping well. It’s those mysterious forces that have us up and peering out the window or finally giving in and going into another room so as not to disturb the only person on the planet not affected by the pull of the moon. Or whatever. One part of me says this is all a bunch of hooey. But another part says, well maybe there is something funny going on. Something out of our control. It’s those woo-woo thoughts that keep me further from the sleep I so desperately want.

If it’s true that no one is sleeping, then what stops me from making a phone call to a friend who will most likely greet my middle-of-the-night intrusion with a “What’s wrong?” Great. Now I have her awake and worrying about me. Sorry, I had it in my head that no one is sleeping these days. Or nights, as it were. The old tune “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haa” comes to mind, so I chuckle and begin to apologize for waking her. She politely tries to reassure me that I should have called her the night before when she herself didn’t get to sleep until something like 4 in the morning. Well, that explains a lot. She’s dead tired herself. Our clocks are out of kilter by 24 hours. Well, we are both wide awake now. Might as well chat a bit.

It doesn’t really matter what we talk about, we’re both on the same page. We have a long history together. We still have our husbands, who at the moment are just this side of being unconscious. Our children are grown and well out of our houses and under their own roofs. All we really have to worry about are the aches and pains that come with the territory and who died this week. So to lighten things up, we step back in time.

To my happy place. And I hope hers as well. We recall those teen years when we thought we were so grown up. We took driver’s education in high school, we were ready to take on the world. We found we needed money and learned it doesn’t grow on trees. What? Get a job? Who has time to work? Life is calling us.

So, we babysat the neighbors’ kids for, depending on a lot of variables, something like 50 cents an hour. If we were lucky. I was more likely to be paid in movie magazines and potato chips. That wasn’t going to cut it. I took a job at Woolworth’s, where, speaking of cutting it, my first job was cutting window shades way in the back of the store, while another friend tended the candy counter! Yet another life lesson. Life isn’t fair. But money is money, and what did we know? We were very new at this business called life.

When I wanted something, like a record player, my mother’s stock response was “save your money.” And to this day, I remember that record player with its spindle that could be switched out to play either 45s or LPs, a stack of them so I wouldn’t have to keep changing the records. And being portable, I could take it to my girlfriend’s house for a pajama party if she hadn’t earned enough money yet to buy her own.

Ah, those were the days. Maybe I’ll sleep tonight. Good night, my friend, wherever you are.