Sunday Afternoon Nap
Monday, October 6th, 2008
Half past two o’clock on Sunday afternoon and though it’s broad daylight, it’s as if someone has turned the lights down on the world.
Children lie by open windows, lulled gently to sleep by sounds far off or not so far in the distance, vacuums and saw blades, small engines and jet engines. Motorcycles being revved in garages with calendars hung on the walls (not for the dates, but for the women) and planes flying high over rooftops – is the music that scores and animates their dreams.
My eyelids start to lower as I steer the car down the last few streets, familiar ones I could probably drive if my eyes were shut. The wheel gets heavy in my hands. It’s easy to steer, but my hands feel like weights at the end of my arm. Each turn leaves me a bit off balance, rocked maybe, by the motion, I can see myself in bed in the room-temperature sheets, in a deep deep sleep, uncaring about the pro sport contests unfolding on television somewhere else in the world.
My priority is rest and it comes so naturally at this time, between 2 and 5, the sun passed over the front eaves and on the backside of the house, on the opposite side of our bedroom. I can rest here undisturbed with a dog and cat wrapped around each other at the foot of the bed, the kitten purring – buzzing from the little box inside him. Bzz, bzz, as soothing as ocean sounds. Bzz, I can feel it reverberating in the pillow next to me rattling in the headboard.
Nap time comes on as sweet and fulfilling as when we were children and waking up rested by with dry mouth, sipping on 5 pm coffee to wake up again as though the day was just beginning. And, it is born again, waking up to Sunday once more but this time a much different day, late with the light changed, shadows leaning the opposite direction, the sun in the opposite sky, me in the exact same place, rested but tired, older, contemplating.
People on the same streets already awake but how they can be doing so much work is beyond me. I can’t imagine anything other than laziness, snoozing. In some parts of the land, there is a minister or preacher performing on stage, or maybe tasting lunch with the congregation and carrying on a hundred different conversations in the lunch room, a poorly tiled church basement or maybe a cafeteria at an elementary school because his followers haven’t amassed the funds for a church yet. I think of saying that sounds deep, but has no real meaning, which is: it’s the preacher with no church who works the hardest.
The dog gives himself a tongue bath and the sour smell floats up in the dead air. I tell him no after he seems to chew something up that he’s found in his fur. He gives a tail wag and a glance from the corner of his eye, and keeps biting the pads on his paw. The kitten is sound asleep, his closed eyes just gray slits, his ears pointed and turned up, like a bat.
Sleep time, curtains blowing into the room gently, whispering it’s time to go to sleep. The mirror reflects the buttery light from the drawn curtains and the bright flashes when the wind pushes hard and let’s light in.
I wake up to sunshine streaming down on the hanging baskets that have kept their blooms into early October. They look as healthy as they did in June or July except for some branches in the middle that are dried brown. Sometime during my slumber, the kitten woke and has perched himself in the window on his haunches waiting for a fly to push against the screen so he can pounce. The wooden porch swing rocks almost imperceptibly in the breeze. The trees are still filled with leaves and there is rustling that drowns out the interstate rush a mile or more in the distance. On the big breezes, the wind completely overwhelms the traffic sound.
The post-nap scene is like a painting I’ve stepped into or maybe a scene from retirement, a vision from when I’ll have enough time to take in the world and feel passionate a bout it, a connection that you can only feel when you know you’ve lost or are losing something. I am far from losing this day, though I’ve slept its afternoon away. I am ready to head out into fall, to discover the fun with my family, the pure elation of being a child (or in my case, the parent of something that can be so fulfilled.)
