Elephants At The Kitchen Window

My wife Paulette was reading awhile back about where you grow while you’re asleep.  “If that’s so,” she said, “I should be nine and a half feet tall.”

Paulette is one of the world’s great sleepers.  Now, I don’t mean that she sleeps all the time.  She gets eight good hours, and then she’s up and rearing to go.  When she’s awake, she’s a real dynamo – great wife, tireless worker.  But when she sleeps, brother, she sleeps.  Rip Van Winkle could take lessons.

I heard one fellow say that there are two kinds of sleepers in the world: light sleepers and heavy sleepers.  In any marriage, there’s likely to be one of each.  If two of the same kind marry, one of them will change, especially if both are heavy sleepers.  No marriage can succeed without one light sleeper.  After all, somebody in the marriage has to hear those things that go bump in the night – like elephants trying to get in the kitchen window.

I don’t know how heavy sleepers get to be that way, but my friend Delbert Earle says it’s all because of something he calls the Immutable Theory of Energy.  I think it’s a notion he got out of Popular Mechanics years ago.  Delbert Earle believes that we are all born with a certain amount of energy, and that we spend our lives using it up.  He says we can’t get any more than we originally had, but we can control how fast we use what we do have.

Delbert Earle says he is a heavy sleeper because he is conserving his energy.  He has finally convinced his wife not to wake him up when she hears elephants coming in the kitchen window.  She takes care of it herself.  So far, none have gotten in -- or at least that’s what Delbert Earle thinks; after all, he’s been asleep.  He has found no elephant tracks in the sink.

We light sleepers – Delbert Earle’s wife and I among them -- are guardians of home and hearth.  But I suspect the heavy sleepers will outlive us and be happier in the process.

Just thinking about it makes me want to take a nap.