Sleepless Nights

                        Sleepless Nights




     Sleep has always been something that I could take or leave.  I have gone 24 hrs without sleep then get a good 8 hrs worth and be fine.  I couldn't tell you how much sleep I have lost over the years.  I think that as a youngster I didn't sleep as much because I thought I might miss out on something.   Now that I am a senior citizen I wonder whether or not I will wake up so I wake up every few hours just to check that body parts still work and feel right.  Last night was one of those nights that I couldn't get my brain to settle down.  It wondered all around with thoughts of the past, present and future.
     Weird images kept floating around, for instance I could see Grandpa Riggan leaning against the house wall on the front porch in a ladder-back chair.  He had on his bib overalls, his Bible in one hand and a corncob pipe in the other.  Smoke rose from the pipe as he silently read passages. Smoking a pipe was probably his only vice and I doubt that he had but the one pipe.  He kept a small cloth bag of tobacco in the bib pouch of his overalls, the bag had a yellow pull string that cinched it closed.  Sometimes he had a can of " Prince Albert " tobacco in the bib and when it or the bag was empty I would get them to put things in them like marbles or small toys.  There was nothing special about his tobacco it smelled like tobacco, looked like tobacco and when burned smelled like burned tobacco.
     Grandpa Wade was a pipe and cigar man.  He carried his cigars in his shirt pocket and pipe tobacco in a zippered leather pouch.  His cigars were usually stuck in the corner of his mouth with great plumes of smoke rising into the air but when he would get involved in talking the cigar would go out and it would then become something he would chew on or hold between his fingers and use as a pointer when highlighting a part of the story he was telling.  Granny saved the cigar boxes for us kids and they became the containers of our most prized possessions.  He had pipes of all kinds all over the house and cans of sweet smelling pipe tobacco on the coffee table.  Sometimes Grandpa would bite off a big plug of chewing tobacco, his car carried the signs of his chewing as when he worked up a lot of juice he would roll down the window and spit.  There was a long stream of dried tobacco juice down the side of the car looking like a pinstripe accenting the paint job or covering the dings created by whacking his pipe against the car to remove the ashes.
     As a young boy I stood in awe of my Grandfathers though they were opposites of each other in many ways.  One was large, loud, and full of life.   The other was thin, quiet, and very laid back with skin the color and texture of leather brought on by hard work in the fields.
     Now the brain moved in another direction recalling an item on the news about a ball player signing a contract for millions of dollars to play a game.  I remembered, when working for a bank years ago, the higher ups decided to look at customers as Millionaires regardless of their current income because during a person's lifetime they would make a million dollars.  This was hard to imagine when I was getting paid $12,000.00 per year to recover money they loaned to people who wouldn't pay it back, maybe they were including the salary Linda was making at the bank down the street.  In the seventies you talked of rich people as "Millionaires".  To even know of a millionaire was put you in high circles of society and now to be a millionaire is only a step above middle class. Multi millionaire is the new status and that is tens of millions.
     I remember five cent candy bars, fifty cent haircuts and no minimum wage, doctors who made house calls, and gasoline for fifteen cents a gallon and the guy who pumped it would give you "Green Stamps" to be redeemed for things.  Nowadays that candy bar cost at least a dollar, haircuts are $15 except for us seniors who can get one for $9.99 on seniors day. Doctor appointments are scheduled months ahead of time and if you get sick without an appointment it will cost extra because it is now an emergency, there is much value in planning ahead.  Gas prices fluctuate from $3.25 to $4.00 you have to pump it yourself and no green stamps.  The oil companies flagrantly flaunt their billions of dollars in profits and claim the high cost of gas is due civil unrest in some faraway country that has no oil reserves or a hurricane may move towards a coastal area of the U.S.
    Another shift in the brain waves.
    Everything is not learned in school.  Some things you pick up by experience or listening and watching others.  I learned that if you walk barefoot thru a yard covered in clover you run a high risk of being stung by a bee when you step on him.  I remember Dad trying to teach me how to tie my shoes - he made a loop from one shoestring and called it a tree then he took the other shoestring which he called the rabbit and as he wrapped the rabbit around the tree he said, "now watch the rabbit run around the tree and jump into the hole".  It wasn't too much of a stretch for the imagination and it worked.
     Switching tracks again.
     Getting older means you have been around for awhile therefore you have been thru many changes of society.  I have come to the conclusion that society has not changed all that much through out history.  I mean even in the middle ages there were the upper class, middle class and the lower class. We still have the same thing today we just call them the rich, middle class and the poor, the only difference today is that there are more people.  There have always been murderers and thieves and horrific crimes perpetrated on society only now there is a larger society.
     I don't remember having restless nights as I grew up.  I guess that is what is called the sleep of the innocent.  More likely it was because I hadn't lived long enough to have that many things that weighed on my mind - much less to remember.  It is hard knowing what the past holds and wondering how much, if any, will effect the future.  Maybe some day society will take the path less traveled - until then older people will have sleepless nights remembering the way things were and wondering how they got  to be the way they are.
     Where is Tinkerbell with the Fairy dust when you need her?