While falling asleep each night is seldom an issue for me, remaining in that state of blissful rest is quite another story altogether. As most people my age can attest, once you wake up – which usually occurs far sooner than you wish – insomnia rears its ugly head, and the most random thoughts prevail.
Last night I was in that lovely state of tranquility when for no reason, my eyes opened wide and my brain started. The previous day, a relative of mine had gone into great discourse about how country music and its singers had changed so drastically in the last few years. I am surmising that my brain took it much more seriously than I initially understood.
“How,” I asked myself in my state of unwanted awakened-ness, “did the country star Jelly Roll come up with the name Jelly Roll? Why not ‘Jelly Biscuit’ or ‘Jelly Cake’? What would George Jones, Loretta Lynn, or Farron Young think about this up-and-coming celeb who sports his tattoos like a discombobulated masterpiece? And what about those tattoos? Does he have room for one more? I think so! His eyelids might be a new and exciting canvas for him. How old is Dolly Parton and how many cosmetic surgeries has she really had? What colors were actually in her coat of many colors?”
Seeing that I have not been a country music connoisseur since my mama played vinyl albums on the exquisitely large piece of furniture we called a ‘record player’, I soon wearied of this mental discussion I was having with myself! But, alas, my brain had only just begun.
From Jelly Roll, I ventured into mentally keeping score of how many times I was flouncing from side to side in the bed since I awakened while wondering what time the clock read and how many clicks I’d heard Kirk’s bad knee make. I absolutely refused to look at the clock because if I did, I knew sleep would be out of the picture indefinitely, and short of cutting my hubby’s leg off at the knee I couldn’t do one thing about that clicking sound. How many hours of sweet sleep had I gotten? How much longer would I need to lie under the warmth of 25 pounds of covers I was underneath? Could I just fall back into sleep? The clock’s unobtrusive little red light captivated my attention, until I couldn’t help myself, and I looked only to find it was far too early and too cold to arise and greet the darkness – I mean ‘day’.
Yikes – I then remembered I was almost out of salt, and one couldn’t prepare a proper nutritional and tasteful meal without it. How in the world did I neglect to buy salt? How do you ‘run’ out of salt? I recalled the Bible said we are the ‘salt of the earth and if the salt loses its savor it’s good for nothing’. “Lord,” I prayed in my insomniac state, “help me to be the salt I need to be.” (Oh, and I really needed to make a grocery list, but it was impossible to write in the dark and I was determined to stay in bed a little longer.)
From there, my mind refused to rest jumping from one exhilarating thought to another. Before I finished thinking, I was as pooped as I was when I went to sleep the night before. Oh well, I concluded, who needs sleep when you can waste your time pondering useless things that have never been pondered before? Then it occurred to me, was Loretta Lynn really a coal miner’s daughter? Was she really raised in Buther’s Holler? Did she ever make jelly rolls?