Sweet Dreams

When I go to sleep, I stop breathing 77 times an hour.

I did not know this until a couple of days ago. I just knew that I slept badly. I have for years. I thought that was just the way it was.

Now, I'm told, that can change. I get a machine that blows air through a mask that I wear at night, and I no longer stop breathing. Restful sleep returns.

As well as being good news, this is discombobulating news. After thinking that there was nothing to do about the sorry state of my sleep, I find out that there is a relatively straightforward remedy. It makes me wonder whether I could do something about other things that I think of as unsatisfactory fixtures.

On my own, I wake up several times during the night. Since His Dogness started having troubles with failing kidneys, he has to go out one or more times during the night. So, between the two of us, being up five times a night is not unusual.

At my annual exam, my doctor asked how my sleep was. Not good, I said, and threw in a couple of details.

Off you go to a sleep specialist, he said.

The sleep doctor sent me to spend the night in a sleep clinic for a sleep study. The technicians applied goop to make things stick, marked the spots for various leads with a marker and then hooked up one wire after another, most of them to my head.

How many? I asked.

Twenty-four, they said.

Are you going to videotape this?

DVD, actually.

What happens when I need to go to the bathroom?

You call out, and one of us will come unhook you.

They helped me into bed, plugged me into the wall and turned out the lights.

I was prepared for a bad night.

I was not disappointed.

I tossed. I turned. The part I disliked most was having to ask to be unhooked in the middle of the night to toddle into the bathroom.

I went home feeling brittle.

After the doctor looked at the report, he sent me back to the clinic the next night to try out the breathing machine.

I didn't expect to see you so soon, I said to the technician.

I did, said the technician.

Despite the circumstances, I had one of the best nights of sleep I had had in a long time.

When I went to see the doctor later that day, he told me that stopping breathing 30 times an hour is considered serious and that, on average, I stopped breathing 77 times an hour that first night. He said that there was another troubling number. Coincidentally, it was also 77. My blood oxygen went down to 77 percent while I was sleeping. It should be well up in the 90s, he said.

The doctor said he considered the situation life-threatening. If nothing were done, I could have a stroke or heart attack.

But something could be done. I could get a breathing machine. I have an appointment on Monday.

In the meantime, I have been filling everyone in on my numbers. Those numbers would be really scary if they had been followed by the words "nothing to be done." Because they weren't, I have been enjoying, in a perverse way, having such dire news. No pedestrian sleep troubles for me. No, sir. Mine are life-threatening.

I'm looking forward to no longer stopping breathing. Who knows what might happen once my brain starts getting all the oxygen that it should at night? Maybe I will become a genius.

Dad

It's going on 16 years since my dad died. For a long time, I thought about him every day. These days, I may go a day or two without thinking about him - or at least noticing that I am thinking about him.

And then something will bring him to mind. Sometimes, he stays for just a memory or two before receding again.

When we lived in a small town in West Virginia, he would sometimes take one of his five children out as a special treat. I remember walking to the movie theater downtown with him one night and taking in whatever movie was playing.

Another time, I remember going around with him during the day as he went about the business of being a minister. In the afternoon, he had to visit someone in the hospital. He didn't think I should come in, so he gave me a quarter - which was what I received for my weekly allowance at the time - and told me that I could spend it however I wanted at a little grocery store by the hospital. I was rich.

Other times, I will find thoughts of him sticking with me for several days running. And so it has been recently. If he were still alive, he would have turned 80 earlier this month. But, he didn't. So he will be always be 64. That means that, as time passes, I am catching up with him. Now the gap is only 11 years. Lately, I have been thinking about how much he accomplished and wondering whether, at 64, I will feel as good about what I have done as I feel about what he did during his time here.

At the moment, it's not looking as if I will.

I did get a bit of information from my mother recently that allowed me to lighten up in comparing myself to him with regard to one of the things that he did. During the early days of the civil-rights movement, he once led a march through the downtown of that small town in West Virginia where we were living. I found out about it the next morning when he and my mother called the children together before school to tell us to slough it off if any of the kids of school said nasty things about my father or family. (None did.)

Through the years, I have sometimes asked myself whether I would have the guts to lead a march during such times. When I mentioned that to my mother recently, she laughed and told me that he had led the march only accidentally.

People asked him to say a prayer before the march started. He agreed. As soon as he was done, the marchers surged forward, and there, to his surprise, he was leading the march.

Doobins and Sparkle Girl's Mom Joins the Fun

The first time I wrote about Mr. Whitfield in the newspaper, I decided to make it a surprise. I thought he would like it but I couldn't know for sure. So I was a little nervous about seeing him for the first time after the column came out.

I hoped to see him sooner rather than later in order to get it over with. I thought it might be right away because the weather was nice on that particular Sunday morning. And, when I take His Dogness out on mild days, Mr. Whitfield is often sitting on his front porch. So, when His Dogness and I headed out first thing, I looked over.

Nothing.

I didn't see him the next few times I was out and about either. By the afternoon, I had more or less forgotten about it. I was at the back of the house hooking up the garden hose when he came up from behind and startled me by saying, "I can't believe it!" in a voice that had the volume turned up a couple of notches for effect.

When I turned around, he said, "I can't believe it! I spend all those years developing a reputation for being mean and then you go and write that. People will start getting the idea that I'm nice."

After that, I didn't fret about writing about Mr. Whitfield in the newspaper.

With some other people, I have asked beforehand. Sometimes, it's a yes. Sometimes, it's a no.

As it was for Sparkle Girl's mom when I wrote about Sparkle Girl for the first time. She decided that she would rather leave the spotlight to Sparkle Girl. As Sparkle Girl's younger brother, Doobins, became more verbal- he often greets me at the door with a "Not you again, Kim" - he, too, become a source of amusing anecdotes and joined Sparkle Girl on stage.

Their mother continued to appear only in passing, perhaps as "Sparkle Girl's mother" or "Doobins's mother" in a list of those present in the scene being described.

Something that never crossed my mind until it was pointed out to me is that, over time, nothing more than the shadowy presence of an unnamed mother could create the impression that she is not as present in her children's lives as she might be.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. It would be absurd to suggest that Garnet loves her children more than other mothers love their children. In healthy relationships, each mother's love is absolute. It's a love that enables a mother to do a 25-yard-dash in 1.7 seconds when she hears a cry of distress.

And so it is with Garnet. This morning, Doobins, who was washing his hands in the bathroom, let out a cry that made thinking he had been burned by scalding water the only natural conclusion. Garnet was there in an instant, to discover, thank goodness, that his anguish was not physical. Mr. Fastidious had gotten cold water on one sleeve of his shirt. Garnet helped him slide off the offending garment and put on a dry one.

One of the great pleasures of my life is watching Garnet do things for her children. Yesterday, I sat at the kitchen table as she fixed Sparkle Girl a special breakfast. I watched her fry apples, mix them with freshly made white rice and milk, top the concoction with fresh blackberries, sprinkle just enough sugar on the blackberries to temper their tartness and then drizzle honey over everything.

If you had said to me, "If you could be doing anything in the world right now, what would it be?," I would have said, "I'm doing it."

Anyway, as of today, we're making the switch from "Sparkle Girl's mother" and "Doobins's mother" to Garnet. You still might not be seeing a lot of Garnet. She thinks I'm a little free with the personal anecdotes so I'm going to try and keep that in mind.