SLEEP (in 43 beds)

My parents purchased (new) a 1969 Pontiac Station wagon. I don’t know which model… my dad doesn’t remember things like this, and my mom would probably botch the memory, if I asked her….

I remember a few cool things about that car, back when station wagons were cool to kids in families of five… The high beam indicator was a pontiac logo indian head in the speedometer that turned red when the high beams were on…. My siblings and I would competed to sit in the front seat so that we could play “Litte Red Indian come on!”

I also remember the wagon had those classice faux wood paneled sides, like the classic movie station wagon from the 1970’s disney films….

The best feature, for my kindergarten aged self, was the little area formed between the two seats in the rear…. Behind the bench style drivers seat was a second bench style seat…. backing up to this seat was a smaller bench style seat that faced the rear of the wagon… (This differed from some other versions of station wagons which had two small seats that faced the center of the car….)

There was a gap between the “second” and “third” (or rearmost) seat, created because of the angle of the seat backs…. it must have been sufficiently wide enough of a gap that I was able to crawl into that space and sleep….

In a large family where we competed for everything… it was about the only thing that was truly “mine”... the “area between the seats” was my seat….

times were such then that parents didn’t worry about what horrible death might befall their child stuffed between two seat backs that weren’t engineered to stay in place during a collision…. so I rode their happy…and my parents were blissfully unaware….

Or maybe they did no it was dangerous…..

hmmmmmm.

For some reason, my father’s parents (Poles, both, don’t you know), had the itchiest most uncomfortable bed imaginable….I’ve no idea why…. I loved going to visit them…. but I HATED sleeping in that bed…. (and it must have really been uncomfortable and itchy, because no one else would ever volunteer to swap with me)....

I’m still not completely convinced that my (former) sister-in-law (whom you know under a different name) is not some sort of spy….. She is, afterall, a former Marine who speaks tons of languages, travels the world, understands everything, who just HAPPENS to be extremely adept at using guns and knives….

It is one of my secret dreams that she will tell me, on my deathbed, that my suspicions were right….

In the meantime, I will continue to get a HUGE kick out of sleeping in what her children gleefully call The Spy Room when I visit her amazing home….. Besides being quite fun, it awesome to be surrounded by the artistry and craftsmanship that went into thinking up, building and decorating rooms which integrate history, culture, pop media and family jokes…..

If you ever find yourself atop that funny flat-topped hill, and are offered the chance to sleep like a spy…. don’t turn it down.

When I was five, my family moved into a rented house in Kokomo, Indiana….. the two story house had this rather strange dormer alcove at the top of the stairs to the second floor. My mother couldn’t decide what to do with this space….. She eventually found that three steamer trunks, in which we stored out of season clothing, fit snugly in the space, which seemed to have no better purpose…. My father persuaded a friend of his who worked in the seat upholstery shop at the nearby Air Force Base to fashion a special mattress, designed to fit atop the three trunks and convert them into a comfortable bed….

Even tho that house was spooky to me…. and I hated parts of it…. I absolutely adored sleeping on the “trunk bed” in the hallway, at the top of the stairs….

When I was a kid, there were certain word combinations that were nearly impossible to say…. even tho we were a poorish middle class family… hovering on the border between poverty and middle class comfort, at the time…. there seemed to be this “hoity toity” streak in my mom, I guess…..In our bedroom, we had a chest of drawers, rather than a dresser…. something difficult for a kid to say “chest of drawers”.... there were other words too…. but one that was more really old fashioned than hoity toity was the phrase trundle beds. I am not sure if that is a brand name that has been co-opted ala Kleenix and Band Aid, or if it refers to a verb…..

In this case, they were specially desiged twin beds with interchangable headboards and footboards….. They were similar to bunk beds in that they could be used as separate twin beds….. or, they could be arranged so that one slid under the other…. they were not like the modernized replacement where the lower bed slides out at floor level then is raised up to bed height…. No…When used in trundle formatin, the lower bed was at normal twin bed height, and could be rolled on wheels underneath the taller bed, which was raised up just enough to make room for the lower bed…. In the stored position, the assemblage looked like one twin bed that was higher than normal…. if you lifted up the bedspread, you found a normal twin bed tucked in underneath….

There were, then, a couple of different possible combinations for nesting the beds…. my favorite was the “L” pattern, where only a portion of the lower bed was slid under the higher one…. The OTHER cool feature about the trundle beds was that the higher one, without the lower one stored under it, made for an excellent “fort” type place to go in and hang out… The roof was about three feet above the ground…. just the right size for a couple of kids to hide from annoying siblings….

My grandmother had a peculiar upholstered chaise chair that I loved from early childhood. I called it the “chair bed.”

I adored it so much. When Grandma moved to the Cayman Islands in 1977, she gave my mom the chair. A few years later, my mom gave it to me. Throughout my high school years, the “chair” was in my room. I slept in it many times. It gets inserted at this spot in the order, because I remember sleeping on it at age 3 or 4 or 5, when it was still in my Grandma’s condo.

{It was shaped just like the piece in this photo, except that it was covered with a fuzzy felt-like material}

The twin beds….. are the same beds mentioned in entry # 4. Sometimes, they were arranged as sepearate twin beds, instead of bunked together. There were two different beds. I am sure I slept in both of them. I think I had sex in one of them, also, years later….

I even had sex with a girl….

I slept in these bad boys for many years. Starting at around age 2 or so, not that I remember that, but I’ve been told that’s when my family acquired the versatile twin beds that could be stacked or used as individual twins. I slept in these beds in my parent’s home until a bit after my sixteenth birthday. Bunk beds offered different features. I was never that much of a top bunk guy, because the bottom was so much cooler. When pushed into a corner, with walls on two sides, it was easy to pretend the bottom bunk was like a berth on a submarine, or a private space capsule, carrying juse one passenger. It was six feet long, three feet wide and about three feet high. Bigger than the Gemini capsule John Glenn rode into space.

Sometimes my brother and I would take sheets from his top bunk, and drape them so they hanged down, closing in the bottom bunk completely, we’d hang out in there as our private clubhouse, ignoring our sisters and doing, well we didn’t do much. The point was just to hang out in there. The “foot” end of the beds was also a cool place to perform puppet shows. The “audience” usually my brother, but sometimes my parents, would sit or lie on my bottom bunk. The puppeteers would sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, using the top rail of the footboard on the bottom bunk as the “stage”.

My puppet shows were elaborate and hilarious. Twists on the old childhood classics. Because I had those puppets that are already specific characters, it was hard to alter their appearance. As a result, I had lots of shows where Smokey the Bear made appearances as, well a Forest Ranger who talked about fire prevention, even if it was to warn Goldilocks or Robin Hood or Batman. My bunk beds kicked bed-ass.

I slept in both beds, over the years…

The home my parents lived in when I was born, which will someday be the Gump Birthplace Museum, had a neat little bed built into a drawer under a larger bed. I slept in that near the end of my parent’s life in that house, and also in the next house, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

As a third bed, it was “top drawer”

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

When my first child was born, my mother gave me a little wooden crib on wheels. It was about one third the size of the brand new crib we had purchased for the nursery. It had been painted a soft yellow color.

I repainted it, and it served both of my sons as their “moving” bed during their first few weeks of life. Mom told me that the crib had once been mine. I count it as my second bed.