What It Is Like To Sleep Later Than You Expected But Not As Late As You Wanted

It's only 7:23 a.m. on Sunday morning, and the sun, barely up, doesn't really help the light register as a day, yet: there is light in the sky but it's not the kind of light you would call day light.

More like pre-light.

Light anticipating the real light to come later on.

Let's be honest: you wouldn't be up yet, if you could have helped not being up, but let's also be honest, you've been up more or less since 5 a.m., less sometimes than more.

Five a.m.: a terrible time to be awake if you do not want to be. Morning news shows starting, Animal Planet shows about chimpanzees and killer whales, and an ostrich? You are propped up against the pillows, waiting for sounds that will wake you back up if you can fall back asleep.

Six a.m.: Not yet light outside.  Sounds from the boys' room. Stirring.  Mr F: he wants you to lay down beside him.

"Let's put in a movie," you say. The television is playing a Baby Einstein that gives them things to say in different languages. It won't hold your attention.  He pulls you by the ear to lay down by him in his closet.  You lay down by him in his closet.

6:10 a.m.: He is back asleep.

You creep quietly out of the room. You go back to bed. Sitting upright, eyes half open, propped up on pillows, wishing that all the sleep you did not get this week would come at once.  If they -- the people that do things -- can ever think of a way to pile sleep upon sleep, to have 8 hours of sleep layered on you instead of coming in waves, sleep piled up on you like blankets when you have the chills, what a miracle!

Seven a.m.: Mr F knocks on the door. He wants to be in the bed. He wants to be on the floor. He wants you to tickle him.  He wants to swing wildly back and forth nearly hitting the chandelier, motioning you away when you try to slow him down. He wants to spin and sing and smile and spin and swing and smile.

You want coffee.

Last night, you did not set up the coffee pot with water and grounds so that this morning you could simply hit the switch and brew it. You went to bed one minute earlier because of that, and now you will have your coffee one minute later because of it, a minute here a minute there a minute everywhere.

The last of the pills for your cough: it should be done today.  They taste terrible. You eat a black jellybean to mask the flavor left in your throat.

You drink some of the coffee, finally.

It's more... better if you turn off all the lights in the house and you and Mr F sit in the light that is neither light nor gloom -- it is something in between, neither hopeful yet nor dark still.

You want toast.

Mr F is slowed down now: he is on the chair, he has the blanket wrapped around him. He sits and looks at his bare belly, wearing only a pair of gym shorts, his belly is wrinkled and he watches it move.

You watch it move.

Upstairs: voices.

This part of the morning is over.

What It Is Like To Steal Newton's Apple.

When I am old, and gray(er), I will remember this, I hope: "There's an apple!"

The tree has a placque and the placque has an inscription and the inscription says that the tree which we stand in front of was, is, could have been, more or less, the same tree that Isaac Newton once sat under, once had an apple fall from, once used to inadvertently realize the truth of all things, which truth is: all things attract each other.

Not fall.

Not have weight.

All things are drawn towards all other things, is what Isaac Newton learned sitting under his apple tree, what he learned when the apple from that apple tree was attracted to his head, and without thinking, really, I am reaching for the small apple hanging from the branch on this tree, my hand attracted to it but it also attracted to me, each drawing towards the other almost as if the tree has drawn our little trio here this afternoon.

We are walking around the campus, this afternoon, and it is seventy-five degrees and we have no real aims or goals.  "Where is the campus?" my youngest son asks me, and I struggle to explain to him what a campus is.

"It's everything around you," I finally tell him, "Everything you see is the campus," but he appears skeptical: the pond, with lily pads? The building? The path? The road? These are the campus?

We had no reason for being here other than to be here.

We had it in mind to walk to this garden, and then to another, and to amble around the campus and see what could be seen and touch what could be touched, and we had already crossed a high pedestrian bridge above the street, we had seen the capital "W" spelled out in flowers -- "Roses!" said the son who talks in words, incorrectly but happily -- and now we had walked past the dorms and past the School of Business and past the sprinklers where we could not play they are just for looking, and in moments we would head further up the stairs, to a building that would turn out to house the Astronomy Department but more importantly to two-thirds of us would also house the way to walk across a skywalk with old-fashioned windows that lean in, open to the breeze, which is absent today and will not come through those windows.

But for now, we are standing beside a tree that was grown from a cutting from the tree under which Isaac Newton sat, centuries ago, and pondered the mysteries of the universe and its universal attractions, everything leaning towards everything else and wanting to get closer always closer, and we have drawn ourselves underneath the tree, very close, and are looking at it, one-third of us in wonder, one-third of us because there are apples, and one-third of us because that is where everybody else is looking, I think.

It feels as though you are time-traveling, to stare at this tree and the apples, hanging from the branches and yes! on the ground, too!

We take a picture, standing before the tree.

The apple, taken from the tree, will rest in my pocket, the remainder of the afternoon, riding in darkness as we walk through hallways in buildings I have never entered before and maybe ought not be in now.

It is smooth, light, small, not ripe, almost spherical but not, quite.

I wonder if it will grow if planted.

I wonder what I will do with it. Can it be preserved? It felt like something I couldn't not take, but having taken it, what can I do with it, now?

The lesson of the day: "There's an apple!" spoken just after I explain that this is Newton's apple tree, really, his still in the same way Theseus' ship can remain the ship of Theseus.

Sometimes the point of things is just that they exist, and we are there to see them, and later to remember that we have seen these things.

What It Is Like To Not Do Nothing.

Nothing never is.  Even when you do nothing you do something, and in particular sometimes the nothing that you do involves not just doing something but thinking about the somethings that you will do when you are done doing nothing.

It is hard to do nothing not least because there are so many people around the world and particularly around you around your world that want you to do something, but even when all those people immediately around you, all those immediate people don't want you to do something you find it's hard to do nothing

Hence: you lay on the mattress on the floor in the blue room that once belonged to the oldest child and then the second-oldest child and now is the domain of the immediate-est people, the youngest and second-youngest, and you are pushed back onto your back by the second-youngest and he topples on top of you and mumbles the word that you know now means to tickle him and so you do.

Is something nothing? Is that nothing when you do something, is lying there on a mattress tickling someone nothing? Or something? Your mind whirls: maybe you could watch a movie go play in the yard check out how the garden is take them to the pool go to the Dollar Store to replace the inner tube with the leak that you duct-taped just ten minutes ago but now has another leak and you need two inner tubes two! because they each want one and you didn't know they would each want one, you bought one only for the child you thought would want one but now they both do and what do they do with them they walk around the house with them, around their waists, inflatable belts or maybe they fear a flood so you have to have two and one is deflating all over again, sad wrinkled flopping on the floor.

Maybe you should go to the botanical gardens.

Is nothing ever?  Tickle and tickle and tickle and what movies do we have?  Lying on the bed arms wrapped around him from the back, hands tousling his hair that sometimes it seems impossible to keep combed, he is lying motionless, too, and the two of you do almost nothing for a moment and you think that if this could last for 100 years this moment I would be perfectly content but even then your mind is racing ahead should you plan on playing a game of chase? Maybe take a picnic to the botanical gardens? What movies do we have?

It is Sunday morning, a time that is hard to do nothing.  When you were young you sat in Church, where you were expected to do nothing but listen, and you didn't really, which is why today you feel you don't understand the story of the 'prodigal son,' you think sometimes that the story makes no sense but think that in the end it must be that you missed the point of it, and Sunday mornings have a feel to them a feel to them that makes you want to do something not nothing maybe because all those years ago all those fine Sunday mornings when you were 4, 5, 6, 10 were wasted -- church is wasted! -- were wasted with sunny outdoors and the smell of freshly cut grass from the people who mowed their lawns on Saturday so they could do nothing on Sunday, all those Sunday mornings when you were rousted early and dressed nicely and sat quietly and listened not at all, maybe the fact that you could not do nothing those mornings, that you could not do something either makes you so hesitant to do nothing today.

Maybe you should go to the swimming pool.

Nothing is not.  You lie there on the bed, feeling a small hand squeeze yours while you do not think about all the things you have to do during the week because you want to stop thinking about all the things you could do right now but also a small tiny part of you in your head wants to not even think about that, wants to do nothing, wants to just sit, and you hear that voice echoing around the whirlwind in your mind and know that you should listen to it but you never do, and should you?

Should you?

Maybe you could go to the playground.

Should you?

You get up, finally, and go downstairs and put on music and put on a television show and pick up some of the mess but not all of it and you plan on all the things you will do when you are done doing all the things you are already doing, and you ask what should we do today? 

And nobody says nothing.