Coming to terms with Mr. Sandman

“You know you’re getting old when you look at the clock to see if it’s late enough to go to bed.”

That’s a meme that popped up the other day and I can’t say I disagree. Well, maybe.

National Senior Citizens Day is next Wednesday, when we all get together and talk about how they miss the good ol’ days. For instance, coming home from work and not having to unlock the front door. For that matter, you never even had a key for the front door, or if you did, it was permanently lost. That’s the house I grew up in, and it may have been for our neighbors.

On reflection, it seems like a different universe.

For one thing, you didn’t have all the options.

You had to make do with regular Cheerios since there were no fruity or pumpkin spice Cheerios, etc. If you wanted to see Star Wars again, you had to wait a couple of years for it to be broadcast on TV with commercials. If you wanted to keep pictures, you had to have a box or a photo album. No Flickr or Photobucket or Google storage.

Wait, Stop. I’m starting to digress before there’s something from which to digress.

I’ll start again. Senior Citizens Day is next Wednesday, a day, according to Ronald Reagan’s presidential proclamation, to “recognize and show appreciation for the value and contribution of elderly people to home, family, and society.”

It’s no secret that yours truly backed into that age bracket a while back, and I came to that realization when young people started calling me “sir.” I’m not sure who qualifies, exactly, to be elevated from a junior citizen to a senior citizen. We usually assume someone is a senior citizen because of — and I’m speaking for myself — the tell-tale signs of various and sundry wrinkles where there were none to speak of before and those funny little spots that didn’t used to be there. And again, speaking for myself, the occasional “how did I get here?” rumination.

AARP says it’s when you’ve cleared that 50-year hurdle (at least that’s when they start sending you mail), but you’ll also find that senior discounts at some places begin at 55; other places, it’s 60 or 65, and the fine folks at Social Security let you claim that honor at 62. There’s no consensus.

I just about decided that this whole thing about defining aging into youth, middle age, and old age categories was invented to sell Geritol. Without exception, I have heard people tell me their mind, spirit, and everything else in their mental wherewithal remain somewhere in their mid-thirties, even though the body has slowed down. As Indiana Jones said, “It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.”

What’s weird for me is that after all these years, I still haven’t learned to sleep properly. Waking up at all hours of the night trying to comprehend the Richard Feynman lecture I watched on YouTube or a song from The Beatles’ Revolver album bouncing around my noodle:

When I wake up early in the morning

Lift my head, I’m still yawning

When I’m in the middle of a dream

Stay in bed, float upstream

It’s true that some people can’t sleep because of sleep apnea. Others have insomnia because they have a condition called ...Internet. It’s like that Twilight Zone episode where the young couple can’t leave the town because the guy keeps coming back to ask a café toy that looks like a little devil what they should do next.

Maybe those of us with sagging eyelids should get together on said Internet and have a Zoom meeting in the dead of night and try to bore each other back to sleep—a kind of “Sleepless in Socorro” ZoomFest.

Speaking of Zoom meetings, why do I keep thinking of Hollywood Squares?

In any case, there are some people who say they are “night people” and they brag about how they’ve read that people who stay up late are more creative or have higher IQs or some such. If that’s true, I’d like to be a night person too, but as it stands, I can’t wait to go to bed. I wake up with the sunrise, which makes me a morning person and, by their way of thinking, stuck with a lower IQ. For that matter, as a morning person, my creativity is hampered as well.

Pardon my sarcasm.

I have, however, discovered there is a happy medium. It’s something they call segmented sleeping. It’s where you start going to bed earlier, and plan to wake up three or four hours and do some stuff. Then go back to bed to finish up your sleep time. It’s kind of like going with the flow.

Anyway, outside of melatonin (or is it serotonin?), it seems to work for me.

Yawn.