A Bedtime Story

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

So, a few months ago my wife and I got a new bedroom.  No, we didn’t move, but all of our children seemed to have. Our house, a century-plus old, four-bedroom Dutch cape in Barre City, suddenly had three empty bedrooms. 

After many years of sharing a double bed, Lorna decided that she wanted a king sized one. I guess I should have realized then that the honeymoon was over. Anyway, I had convinced her to simplify and purge a lot of things she once considered ‘collectibles’, so getting a new bed seemed like a small price to pay. We mutually decided to only move things that we really cared about or needed into the new bedroom and found that most of the accumulated collections in the old room were things we had been given, but when and by whom was anybody’s guess. (Sometimes having a less than perfect memory may be a blessing.)

We succeeded in repairing walls, painting, and getting the new bed in only a few weeks, the house probably groaned a sigh of relief at shedding those hundreds of pounds of ‘stuff’.

The first few nights in our new bed, had strange thoughts. I don’t sleep well anyway, and suddenly found myself out of reach, literally out of ‘touch’ with Lorna. One night, while lying on that bed, missing my wife who was only five or ten or twenty feet away, I literally thought of an evolutionary tale I once read about giraffes growing long necks so they could reach the highest leaves on the trees, (That seems more like a tall tale to me.  Get it? A ‘tall’ tale?) I wondered if my arms would get longer sleeping in this bed, so I could at least touch my wife’s hand. I mean, we weren’t going to have more kids, but this was ridiculous.

The bed is one of those platform ones that is about the size of a tennis court, and just changing the sheets seems akin to putting new sails on a three masted schooner or something.  

That bed is totally comfortable. That much I will concede. The mattress is fourteen inches thick and made of some foam stuff that I am convinced is a combination of rubber, playdoh, silly putty, and morphine. Believe me, you feel NOTHING when lying on that mattress. You can even get up and leave the room without jiggling or disturbing your partner. What fun is that?

There is an adage that says absence makes the heart grow fonder. There is another one that proclaims: “out of sight, out of mind.” I was not exactly out of sight in that bed, but if you had poor vision, I might have been. 

I was beginning to think I was getting paranoid about this whole thing. The bed is very nice, and Lorna seems happy with the new, uncluttered room. I guessed our new nighttime long distance relationship would be okay.

Do you remember, as a kid, making a telephone using two tin cans and a piece of string? I’m thinking of surprising Lorna with one of those some night. “Hello. Can you hear me way over there?”

          Every morning, looking in the bathroom mirror, I realize that my wife looks younger than I do, and I’m thankful for that. (If she didn’t, I might not care that she sleeps on the other side of that new bedroom.)  She’s still very pretty, very smart, and even still fits in the earrings I bought her in high school.

At night Lorna keeps her phone way over yonder on her nightstand, and mine is on my nightstand. I may just call her some night soon to see if she’s busy.