SOL Tuesday: How Not to Wake Up in the Morning

            I have a sleep-monitoring app on my phone—because I think a device will tell me what time I’ve gone to sleep and how long I’ve been awake in the middle of the night better than my memory will. I know, that’s probably a wrong assumption, but there it is.

            Anyway, the sleep-monitoring app wants my phone to be near the head of my bed, and since I don’t have a night table, I place the phone on the shelf of my headboard. The app also has an alarm, unlike any alarm I’ve ever had—it plays a succession of musical notes in a rising sequence, starting from lower or higher notes, and starting quietly, then gradually getting louder. It runs through this pattern for perhaps three minutes, stops, and a few minutes more it starts again. To my surprise, it actually does wake me up, but always in the best way.

            Yesterday morning, the app woke me, but not fully. Then my real alarm, the beeping of my clock radio, woke me harder, and I wanted to turn off the humming of the phone app. I fumbled for the phone in a still half-awake state, and knocked the phone out of the headboard—and somehow into the narrow space between the headboard and my bed.

        Let me explain this setup. I have a captain’s bed with three drawers on each side. There is no “under the bed” space. When I bought this bed a few years ago, to replace the previous captain’s bed whose drawers were falling apart, I also bought a new headboard. The previous headboard was also old, given to my husband by a former employer decades ago. It was also separate from the bed, so if something fell under the headboard, we could move the bed to reach it. 

            When the new bed was delivered, the deliverymen installed the headboard, then started bolting the bed to the headboard. I was surprised. I thought of asking them not to do that, because I imagined that I might drop something under the headboard, and then I wouldn’t be able to move the bed to get to it. But I didn’t. I let them bolt the two structures together, and for seven years I was careful to push the mattress as close to the headboard as it would go, to not leave any space for something to fall through.

            Until yesterday morning. There was the phone, lying on the floor under the headboard, out of reach. As if injected with adrenaline, I fairly leaped out of bed, grabbed the headboard, and yanked. Somehow I managed to move the whole structure maybe five inches away from the wall (I’m almost 80 and have been to the gym only sporadically because of Covid the past couple of years, but that adrenaline really works).

            Next I marched to the kitchen to get the arm extender that had been my mother’s, a foldable tool with a handle at one end, a grabber at the other. I managed to use that tool to reach the phone and edge it close to where I could reach in and retrieve it. Whew!

            Then I had to move the whole contraption back against the wall. I could pull with my arms, but I couldn’t push. Instead, I sat on the floor, back to the bed, feet against a dresser in a convenient place. It was hard, but I did manage to push the bed/headboard back against the wall.

            Success! Yet exhaustion. I really hadn’t wanted to wake up that way. It was several minutes before I got out of bed for the day.

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