How soon can I go back to bed?

 

Do some moments from your childhood—ordinary moments, nothing of special importance—come back to you with amazing clarity? I remember one morning going to the garage with my mom. She was going to drive me someplace—not school, because I walked to elementary school and took public transportation to high school (and I’m so old that we didn’t have middle school in Chicago in my day). Out of the blue she suddenly said, “I woke up this morning wondering how soon I could go back to bed.” For her, at that time in our lives, the answer was at least ten at night. I can’t date this incident precisely but we had the pale blue Ford (I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye), so it was undoubtedly the Fifties, and I was too young to drive but old enough to understand what she was saying.

This came back to me today because that’s the way I’ve felt all weekend. I’ve said before that even though my schedule is my own, I somehow let down on weekends, move at a slower pace. And this weekend I wanted to sleep a lot. Two things kept me from it: the first is Sophie, though she slept until eight yesterday, praise be! And today her snuffling and coughing woke me at six-fifteen, but I gave her a Benadryl and talked gently to her about it not yet being daylight. She went back to bed and slept until eight.

The other thing that calls me to get out of bed is my conscience. I don’t remember it ever being said directly, but in the house of my childhood, sleeping late was a bit slothful. There is the world’s business to be up and about. This morning I finally got up for real about nine and felt terribly self-indulgent. One of the things that distinguishes weekends is that I generally don’t try to write fiction. I don’t know why Saturday and Sunday feel different, but they do. I did today read some background material and work out the genealogy of a family whose history I hope will play into the story—found I needed to slip in another generation or I would have had women having babies in their sixties.

And I had the neighborhood newsletter to get out. We will lose two working days this week, so I was anxious to get it to the designer in the hope that it could still come out about the first of December. I had done most of the work on Friday, proofread what I’d done yesterday, and waited for stragglers to send their stuff today. Frustrating. But tonight it is in the hands of the designer, and one more thing is off my conscience.

Last night, Jean came for supper. I made a chicken casserole and cooked an artichoke a neighbor gave me. The casserole is part of my current interest in retro food—used good old cream of mushroom soup, with chicken and hard-boiled eggs and a lot of diced celery for crunchiness. Made a sauce of mayonnaise, lemon, garlic, and pecorino cheese for the artichoke. Another time I’ll leave out the minced garlic—just hard little bits you don’t want to bite on. The dinner was so good, I had it all over again tonight.

But before I had my supper tonight, friends Subie and Phil came for happy hour with their son, Sean, and his girlfriend. I haven’t seen Sean in a while and as glad to meet Roni. We had a jolly time, arguing over literary figures and movies and somehow avoiding politics. Sean and I are Facebook buddies, on the same page about everything from Kyle Rittenhouse to covid vaccinations (he’s a nurse practitioner). When the Rittenhouse name came up tonight I simply said, “Don’t get me started.”

Now I’m off to read a mystery I just started: Funeral Food, by Kathleen Taylor. Set in a small-town café in South Dakota and so gritty you can smell the dust off the prairie. There’s a lot of focus on sex and inuendo, and the narrator’s tone is irreverent and wonderful to read. The story involves two Mormon missionaries adrift in this town but more than that I don’t know.

Tonight, I read; tomorrow I get back to work.