Reading is FUNdamental

I don’t sleep well under the best of circumstances. I’m a perfect example of the joke in which a man is asked, “How did you sleep last night?” and in reply, exclaims: “I slept like a baby! I woke up at midnight, two o’clock, four o’clock…” I like to think that this is a positive attribute—a manifestation of my keen mothering instinct, causing me to sleep lightly, one eye open, always vigilant to the possibility of harm coming to my sleeping children. Never mind the fact that none of said children actually sleeps in my house on a regular basis (the baby is almost 23, recently graduated from college, and has a job and lives in an apartment New York.)

But more likely it’s a combination of age, hot flashes, anxiety, and my husband’s snoring. It’s a rare night indeed that I sleep blissfully and soundly; so unusual, in fact, that if I awaken and it’s already light outside and I realize that I’ve somehow slept straight through for as many as six hours, my immediate gut reaction is terror, as if I’ve slept through a disaster that could have been prevented, had I only been paying attention. That hypothetical tornado never would have torn the roof off the garage, had I been lying awake in the dark and listening intently for a subtle shift of the wind. And surely when those imaginary burglars crept up on the back porch, they would have somehow sensed an aura of wakefulness surrounding the house, and would have carefully and soundlessly backed away and gone to break into my neighbor’s house instead. (I acknowledge that the motion-activated flood light my husband installed above the back door could also be a factor, but I know in my bones that it’s really my vigilance that averts catastrophe. “Yes, officer, I heard footsteps outside, and when I looked out the window, I saw the driver get out and place the bomb underneath the car.”) The first thing I do upon awakening every morning is to go downstairs and walk through the house, just to reassure myself that everything is as it should be—no broken windows, no small airplanes smashed to pieces in the yard, no dead bodies lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, leaking blood onto the linoleum. When I go back upstairs, my husband says, “Why do you do that?” I honestly don’t know.

This tendency towards insomnia is particularly acute when I am away from home. Hotels are a problem; uncomfortable beds, unfamiliar sounds, and the heightened anxiety of being away from home guarantee that I will have trouble falling asleep, and even more trouble staying asleep. I routinely travel with no fewer than two mini-clip-on reading lights, since when you’re in a hotel in an unfamiliar city and it’s 3 AM and your spouse is sleeping soundly in the other bed, you can’t turn on the light or the TV without disturbing him, and you can’t just go downstairs to the kitchen and make yourself a cup of herbal tea, and you certainly can’t go outside for a walk outside in an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night, especially because you haven’t brought the dog with you. And even if you had, it’s highly likely that the hotel is located on or near a busy highway and there are no sidewalks. So the only thing to do is to clip the mini-clip-on reading light to the edge of a book, and read. Thank heavens for books.

When I prepare for a trip, books have a status in my packing hierarchy just below my wallet. I pack reading material the way other people pack their toothbrushes: it’s an essential item, but if you forget to pack it, the first thing you do when you get there is buy another one. I’ve spent enough sleepless nights in enough unfamiliar beds to know that reading is the only way I’m going to get through the night, so that there is a certain amount of anxiety associated with leaving the house without sufficient reading material.

This obsession-- Um, I mean "coping mechanism"--is reasonable enough for overnight journeys, but lately it’s begun to get out of hand, spilling over into just local trips. My husband and I can be leaving the house on an errand, and just as he’s locking the door, I realize in panic that I have nothing to read, and I say, “Wait, I forgot something,” and he unlocks the door and I dash inside and return a moment later with a paperback book or, if it’s Sunday, the New York Times Magazine. My husband will look at me incredulously. “We’re only going to the mall,” he’ll point out. (The mall is, roughly, a 4-minute drive from the house.) But what if there’s construction, and we have to sit in traffic for 2 or 3 whole minutes? What if my husband decides to stop at the bank, or worse, Home Depot? If there will be any sort of waiting involved, I’ll need something to read.