Counting Beaches

March 5, 2018

Greetings from sleeping beauty,

For no good reason, I got idioms.  Just about to sleep and out of some crease in my subconscious comes an idiom.  “March comes in like a lion and it goes out like a lamb.”  Now I am trying to figure out what the current weather qualifies for, lion or lamb, like it matters at all.

But that leads to: Starve a cold, feed a fever. Pot calling the kettle black.  It’s raining cats and dogs.  The part of my brain where curiosity lives lights up.  ‘Hey, if you’re going to think about idioms, let’s get the rest of the conscious tools up to do some research.’

This is no way to go back to sleep at 2:13.

I am an excellent sleeper at least while I am asleep.  I am good at the falling asleep part usually, it’s the staying asleep part that is a work in progress.  There is an endless supply of advice on this subject which is some of the things I try to remember when I am trying to get back to sleep.  At 2:13 I am trying to recall if the advice is to stay in bed or to get up.  And then: Is it ‘Feed a cold, starve a fever’ or the other way? 

I get up and find that the advice is: If you can’t sleep, get out of bed and do something uninteresting.  I read this and thought that lying in bed is one of the most uninteresting things I know.  Too late, now I am in the Google vortex looking up the origins of idioms.

Of course I’ve tried counting things.  Sheep, which are regularly running off.  I count backwards from 100, losing track several times.  I once tried to list all the states I’ve visited, which led to an internal conversation about gerrymandering.  What I like to do in between these exercises is to look at the clock and see if I can count the seconds between each change in the digital numbers.  Nope.

And then this discussion; did I just dream that I saw the clock at 2:13?  That would explain why it hasn’t changed.  Is this the week we start Daylight Savings time? Is it ‘Fall forward spring back’ or the other way?  Think of a poem about it.  Hour.  Our.  Bower.  Tower.  Lauer.  What happened to Matt Lauer?  What rhymes with sleep?

I can sometimes feel my heart beating and I think it is rocking the bed.  I wonder if that is normal.  I wonder if there is something wrong with my heart.  I’ll look it up tomorrow.  I begin making lists of things to do tomorrow.  I realize I never did any of the vaporized list from the night before and I feel guilty.  My subconscious, inspired by my guilt, starts its own list.

I found myself thinking about beaches.  What took me here was the idea that I wanted to relax enough to drift off to sleep, and I started picturing some beautiful places I’ve been, including beaches. Some of which were great places to sleep.  

Metamora.  Anna Maria Island.  Ludington.  Mazatlan.  Torrey Pines. Tawas. Ipperwash.  Bondi. That little place in Hawaii that the locals won’t tell anyone about.

At the beach with my children.  Frisbee.  Floating on air mattress.  Standing in the shallows and watching the minnows   Seaweed.  The smell of dead fish and sunscreen.  Floaties.  Sand sculptures piled next to wet excavations.  Screams of laughter at cold water.

Walking with friends along the shoreline, awed by the carved rock, the silky sand, the unusual shells, the color of the water.  The endless liquid horizon.  The odd contradiction of sound, dulled by the vastness of the water, and sharpened by the quiet.

Lying on a towel, feeling the heat of the sand radiating into my back.  The sun is proud of how it looks in blue.  I can feel a bead of sweat making its way to the pool in my navel.  I can hear the water introduce itself to the sand.  Seagulls comment on their view. 

I count my breaths.  I get as far as four.  The clock gives up and looks away.

Hope this finds you with your toes in the sand,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith