The cascading consequences of going to bed early

It was a recent Tuesday evening when a lengthening chain of cool, gray and ceaselessly rainy days finally caught up to us.

“This weather is killing me,” I told my wife as I sank into my recliner. “I just can’t keep my eyes open.”

Kristin, the true night owl of the pair, concurred.

“Same here,” she said. “I’m thinking of just heading on up to bed and sleeping this whole mess out.”

And so the two of us retired to evening quarters with our trusty hound Frank in close pursuit.

Frank hates the rain and isn’t very fond of wetness in any regard, for that matter. Here’s a dog with a seemingly endless appetite that will skip entire meals if it means stepping out into the mist to reach his food dish. The utility in sending the dog outside to eat, of course, is it saves us an extra trip outdoors when the inevitable final step in his digestive process occurs.

On account of the rain, my kindhearted wife had deviated from the “kibble in, kibble out” logic and fed Frank his last meal of the day indoors. This I learned as he barked wildly at the back door at 3 a.m., declaring an emergency.

I leaped from the sheets and raced downstairs to send the dog out into the darkness. Meanwhile, the blast of cool air stirred my own run for the restroom, and I dashed back inside, where I sought to enter the downstairs lavatory — a room which is part of our “nighttime kitty prison.”

With the ever-present menace of our daughter’s cat One Nostril Newt in the mix while under our long-term foster care, we’ve found it necessary to sequester not only him, but also our own cats as well each night. By sectoring off the basement and first-floor restroom as an overnight “kitty space,” we limit not only the disturbance of our sleep, but also the inevitable destruction that occurs when marauding cats have free rein over an entire household.

In my haste I threw open the door to kitty prison and was immediately rushed by a pair of the four-legged felons. Reflexively, in a nod to my long-ago soccer days, I threw a quick left-right block to thwart the escape. The right worked; the left did not, and as I bashed my pinky toe on the door jamb, a fugitive cat squirted across the wire and into the darkness.

I entered, nevertheless, and stood before the throne with my toe bloodied and throbbing as Frank announced the completion of his own task by barking loudly from outside the back door.

As I raced back through the kitchen to let the dog in, I caught a glimpse of my own cat Moses as he leaped down from the kitchen sink with the surly air of a pardoned prisoner. Something was in his mouth, but I needed to get that dog inside before he woke the entire neighborhood.

Frank was first on the scene to investigate Moses’ infraction. Moses had pulled from the sink a full-faced tangle of chicken bones from which I had strained a hot batch of bone broth hours earlier. Frank scooped these remains in a single, gluttonous chomp, and as I struggled to pry open his jaws, he swallowed the lot in one gulp.

Hopelessly coked on adrenaline, I retreated to my bed to lie fully awake for the remaining three hours of the night until rising promptly at my usual 6 a.m. I’d gained exactly nothing beyond a black-and-blue toe and a pile of dog vomit by going to bed three hours early the night before.

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.