Good Morrrrninng

Good morrrrninng! The cable guy rang the doorbell at 8:15 a.m. for an appointment that was supposed to take place between 9 and 11. Is that a first? Under their old policy, the guy called on the way to the house; if you didn’t pick up the phone, he assumed you weren’t home and cancelled the appointment. The last time he came I had been in the bathroom when the phone rang and missed the call. By the time I got a customer service rep. on the phone they had cancelled my appointment. So this time, I made sure the phone was right next to me, like an alarm clock! But today, no warning, 45 minutes early and the two of us, me and my husband, in a dead sleep, he rings the bell. “Sorry I’m early.”

I had taken a half an Ambien when sleep seemed like a foreign concept at 11:30 p.m. and my head felt like it was in a diving bell at the bottom of the ocean. I took the Ambien because I had had two cups of regular coffee the previous morning to get me ready to corral my five nine-year-old students at Hebrew School and that’s enough real coffee to keep me awake for several days. I use the word “students” lightly. The dictionary describes a student as “a person formally engaged in learning; any person who studies, investigates, or examines thoughtfully.” So, by definition, these are not students. They are more like rabid kittens. Child A was absent; child B had something up his nostril that was infinitely more fascinating to him than anything I was saying; child C contemplated her cookie as if the Hebrew letters were somehow encoded into the chocolate chips; child D used every question as a prompt for a lengthy story that was in no way related to the topic; and child E, bless his bright little face, was with me every step of the way. I love that child. Anyway, the reason I needed the coffee in the morning that led to needing the Ambien that night was that, on the previous night, I stayed up to watch the Yankees beat the Angels in the bottom of the 13th inning and was so engrossed in the game that it was 1 a.m. when I suddenly looked up, inquired “What day is it?” and realized I had to teach in the morning. So, from 1:30 – 2:00 a.m. and again from 7:00-8:00 a.m., I sweated over ways to relate the Israelites receiving the Ten Commandments to the lives of these sleepy, disheveled urchins before me. I asked a simple question: what activities to you engage in that have rules? I figured they’d come back at me with the rules of the sports they played; soccer, softball; the things my kids had done when they were this age. None of them plays an organized sport! Come on Moms and Dads! Get these kids moving! No wonder they’re nuts! Child E thoughtfully offered “Track”. Are there rules in track? I don’t know them. They say “Go” and you run, right? Is “run around the circle” a rule? Child C immediately thought of the school cafeteria and the life altering mandate, “No food fights”. This prompted child D to launch into a lengthy description of his lunch while child B picked his nose.

But I digress. My husband handled the cable guy who “fixed” the problem for the fourth time while I put my two-ton head back on the pillow. At 8:30, with the TV working, he sat down to watch. I slogged through a deep-dream in which I crawled out on a ledge to watch a high school presentation of a scene from “Two for the Seesaw” which was then mis-explained by a white-haired pedant who knew nothing about Gittel, or Gibson or women in general, causing me to raise my hand to challenge his assumptions and thus losing my balance to that I started to tumble off my ledge which woke me up. My husband was by now returning to bed. It was now 10:30 and my head was almost light enough to pick up. I lurched downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of decaf, and opened my computer.

Many thoughts swim through my head. “They call baseball ‘the game of inches’ but isn’t all of life that way? It doesn’t take much to tip a scale one way or the other.” “Find some time to go to Florida”. “Pay that stack of bills on the table.” The leaves outside my window are starting to turn. Life is slipping by. This can’t be what all that studying was about. And yet it is. This is my life.