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The Source

I’ll admit that I’m addicted to National Public Radio. I even pay way too much to have XM radio in my car so I’m never out of range of an NPR station. The old joke is that you can tell who listens to the radio network by looking out your window and into the various driveways on your street. If there’s someone sitting in the car that means they’re halfway through one of the NPR stories and don’t want to miss the end. A couple of weeks ago they devoted an entire hour to the subject sleep and they began with the Mallard ducks. Some enterprising researcher was observing a team of four ducks on his local pond and noticed that they were all sitting on the same log, but the two middle ducks were sleeping with both eyes closed and the outside quackers had one eye open. After about thirty minutes the outside ducks stood and rotated 180 so the other eye would be open. Another year of research found that many animals sleep with one eye open on the lookout for predators. I guess the outside ducks were standing guard. They attached electrodes to various other ducks, reptiles and mammals and found that the right eye was attached to the left side of the brain and vice versa, thus allowing Daffy and his friends to put one half of their brains to sleep while the other half stayed vigilant for Elmer Fudd. Who else but NPR would spend an hour on this? I love it. They concluded by saying that humans are one of the few creatures who actually conk out completely with both halves shut down. Having taught Jr. High for 35 years I had no trouble agreeing. This can even be done while sitting up with eyes open in English class. The program then went on to explain how some sleepers will awake at the slightest sound while others can sleep through Armageddon. Although I sleep soundly, the slightest tick will easily arouse me. I blame this on being the sponsor of Triopia senior trips for 18 years. Eighteen long years. Eighteen years of chaperoning over-hormoned students in strange motel rooms. One of the reasons I finally begged out of the job of senior sponsor was the fact that I could no longer sleep in a motel room without waking at every sound. My ears had been trained to hear the distant click of a motel room door at the far end of the hallway . . . on the next floor . . . in the motel across the street. Any high school teacher worth his lunch bag knows that no good will ever come from a door opening at 1 a.m. Add to this my memory of what I tried to get away with on my own class’s senior trip and the result is a Me who will awaken at the sound of a mouse belch. So how does a light sleeper sleep soundly? The answer is noise: just enough noise to drown out all the other noise. I once bought one of those white sound machines that simulated the sounds of a forest at midnight or the gentle lapping of ocean waves. Didn’t work. I kept itching from imagined ticks or I’d get seasick. I tried static on an out-of-reach FM radio station. No good. The station would drift in and out and I’d be awakened at 2 a.m. by the sounds of the Beach Boys “Surfin’ USA.” I’ve settled on a simple fan blowing in my bedroom. It gets a little nippy at times, but it successfully drowns out the terrible hubbub of Arenzville traffic. Of course the problem is when I travel and must share a room with someone who not only has no access to a fan but whose tastes are more un-fan-full. The problem is compounded when my roommate snores. Maybe their wives have gotten used to their nocturnal buzz saw but I have not. It drives me crazy. I simply cannot sleep with a snorer. Thus, the earplugs. I’ve found that the only noise blockers that truly work are the little globs of stuff that resemble a waxen slug. You peal off a glob of the stuff and cram it into your ear, successfully blocking every sound short of a nuclear blast. One of my riverboat roommates has a snore that approaches the rock concert decibel level so I always keep a supply of wax plugs when we go a-boating. One night I securely wedged the little globs into my ears but when I awoke the next morning I found that one was missing. I searched all through my bed sheets . . . nothing. The next day I was performing on the boat and somewhere in the middle of the second verse of “The Robert E. Lee” I reached up to scratch my beard and found something that resembled a squishy amoeba. It was my earplug. The NPR report promised to reveal the secret to a great night’s sleep at the end of the broadcast, but I missed it. I’d fallen asleep.