Sleep Like a Baby

In my recent sojourn in the Berkshires, I saw a ten month old baby fall asleep face down on the carpet with her head half under the couch. This was after wearing herself out playing with my shoelaces. I thought of my grandson who at three crashed under a table at a restaurant during Frank’s 70th birthday. Also of his father, who nodded off in one of those comfy baby lounging chairs on top of a table in a raucous dance club in Stockholm in the winter of 1972.

Photograph taken in Stockbridge, MA by JoAnne Spies

At the same time, I saw a group of Jews in their seventies and eighties suffer agonies of despair over the Nova disaster, the Gaza genocide, the Netanyahu government and the coming election in our country in advance of which Trump has announced that if he loses, the Jews will be at fault. I believe this is called a tautology. It is what it is or it is what he says it is.

I saw friends who I’ve known more than five decades, loving each other immoderately while losing their mobility, their hearing, their vision, their capacity to remember, leaning on each other for support, trying to keep themselves from falling asleep under the couch. I heard them express their opinions about hearing aids, Hezbollah and the plight of Haitians in Ohio while calculating the odds that the Mets would make it to the postseason. I saw new life crawling ahead and old life skating backwards. It was a vast panorama, like a medieval morality play, an allegory of New Life, Old Life, Wired Up and Winding Down. And there I was in the thick of  it, not a neutral party by any means. A participant observer, like Orwell washing dishes in restaurant kitchens when he was writing Down and Out in Paris and London. I was up to my eyebrows in the living, breathing experiment  of getting from Wednesday to Thursday on planet Earth in the year 2024, waiting for the election and the post-election mayhem. We took a straw poll and decided that Kamala would win but violence would follow. Small wonder there are nights I can’t sleep.

I think a lot about the bliss of falling asleep in the middle of the action because sleep periodically threatens to abandon me. I think of it as an entity, a presence that is sometimes friendly and well-intentioned and sometimes malign, a mean girl. It’s useful to see sleep “over there” wreaking havoc instead of inside of me, something I’m just bad at. My chances improve with sunshine on my face as it was in Stockbridge the other day, nowhere to go, nothing to do.  I thought of the time I was rewarded with a world class nap canal-side in Venice at the end of a very long day of travel. This sliding into nothingness must be what the baby gets to do under the couch. Letting go of every scratchy, sandpapery sensation. Falling into a satiny slumber.

Writing is the comforter and pillow that allows me to tolerate the abrasive conditions of life. I scootch down into my memory and caress the silk border of my blanket, the oozing sweet hot fudge of the topping on the sundaes my mother and I ate on adjoining high stools at the mahogany counter in the Schrafft’s on 82nd street. These could just be our best moments. We both loved hot fudge. In many ways, we were very different. She was partial to hats with veils and antique jewelry and rouge. I loved Ernie Kovacs and the yellow properties in Monopoly. But at night we were exactly the same, two girls who didn’t know how to rest. We were both sleepless. Sometimes, if I called to her, she would come into my narrow bed with me. Then the warmth of her body would surround me and we would both be seduced and blessed by sleep. I am visiting that moment here when I lift my face up to the sun in the churchyard in Stockbridge. I am letting go of the woes of the world and descending into oblivion like a baby.

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