Sleep of Veals

Can I tell you something in confidence? I am so exhausted. So very tired. But don’t tell my wife, though. She’s up every three hours feeding the new baby, only love and that new-mother-glow keeping her from morphing into a sleep-deprived zombie. Graciously and generously (and perhaps because I’m the only one of us who currently has to drag his/her silly carcass to a job every morning for forty hours a week) she allows me to sleep on the couch. I get about six hours’ sleep a night, usually interrupted at some point for something around 3 or 4 am.

But it’s really the weekends that are killing me. Let’s face it, I am a veal. My wife started calling me one ten years ago, and I probably came to terms with the veracity of that statement after we moved into our house in ’04. Now with the Littlest Addition to the family, there’s just so (insert vulgar cusswords here) much to do. I won’t bore you with a list like I did last weekend. But, as a veal, all I want to do is lay, read, and write. Yes, I enjoy exercising, and I will do a reasonable amount of chores, but doggonit, these past two months have been crazy off the rails. Weekends are made for catching up on your sleep, right? That’s why God made ’em. I want my weekends back.

Anyway, been thinking a lot about sleep today. Sleep, O blessed and pure! Slumberland, Dreamland, the Land of Nod, let me loiter and spend uncountable time among your serene clouds. Allow me to graze in your sheep-filled peaceful pastures! Refresh me! Rejuvenate me! Maketh me a new creation!

Perhaps John Keats wrote best of blessed Sleep, capital-S Sleep, so taken for granted when plentiful, so sorrowfully sought for when scarce:


To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embowered from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the «Amen», ere thy hoppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes, -
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.