At some point, my knack for napping vanished. I think the last good nap I took, I lost a gallbladder.
I have a friend who has perfected the art of the afternoon snooze. The entire world, including the mailman, knows that she is napping every day between two and four-ish. There were several times I forgot what time it was and called during the sacred siesta. I hung up promptly when she answered with, "This damn well better be good."
Seeing as she was my best friend and I couldn't talk to her for two hours a day, I thought, "Why not?" I instituted a naptime for myself.
I concluded during my kids' teen years that both baths and naps subdue the inertia of daytime drama. I honestly believed that if I didn't know about it, it didn't happen. The house was always unnaturally quiet when I woke up, but I didn't smell smoke and no one was bleeding. Impasse. I didn't ask questions, they didn't offer answers. It was unspoken that whatever happened during naps was partly my own fault for laying down on the mom job. As the kids got older, they delighted in telling me all the crap that they got away with during my daily intermissions. Oh, they smoked cigarettes, sucked all the cheese out of the aerosol cans of Easy Cheese, and took joy rides down the dirt road.
I so perfected the art of napping that one day, after missing my midday slumber, I fell asleep in the McDonald's drive-through. I was so embarrassed that I drove on through without ordering, slinking past the pick-up window with my visor pulled down, sitting high in the seat so they couldn't see me.
My nap sessions began waning as the years went by and culminated into something really weird. I would have lucid, horrendous nightmares within minutes after drifting off to sleep. One of the nicer ones: I was in the hospital and the nurse was putting my new bundle of joy in my arms. E.T. Yes, the extraterrestrial. I had to quit.
Last week, I found myself alone on the couch. Tired of reading, I put my book down and closed my eyes. The patio door was open, the sun and breeze had already knocked out our lab, Snowy. I kicked off my sandals and pulled my feet up on the couch. I thought of the best naps I could remember—a swing hung from an ancient oak tree, the gentle rock of a boat in a quiet covey, the sound of fish tails softly slapping the water. Lying down with my baby brother, my child, or my grandchild to put them to sleep and dozing off myself with their fingers curled around mine.
In the end, the whir of the ceiling fan blades and tick-tock of the grandfather wall clock droned me to the zone. I'm back.
(Quick Grit editor's P.S.: I found an image for Renae's post at a blog called 1000 Awesome Things. If you follow this link and scroll down to the comments, lots of readers posted "Illegal napping" stories. There's a George Costanza one in there—catching a nap right under the desk at the office. That's some good napping.)
