Kinsler: We really need blackout window shades for the bedroom

It’s somewhat embarrassing, I suppose, but I have managed to change my sleep/wake schedule such that it is the diametric opposite of Natalie’s. My virtuous spouse has always kept what any Victorian behavior specialist would call ideal: go to sleep at 11:00 pm, sleep on her back like a tomb figure, wake up with a minimal yawn at 7:00 a.m., feed the cats, make coffee, and attend to e-mails like her daily messages to friends who live alone.

M Kinsler, confirmed wastrel, is another story. I’ve often been awake to see the sunrise with my beloved, but from the other end, so to speak, for I will have been up all night. All of my work is from home: tutoring, writing, and clock repair, and for the most part always has been. I presume that this is because I find a certain amount of peace at 3:30 a.m. I enjoyed night-shift work at radio stations, the Ford engine plant, and any other venue that would tolerate a night person. I took evening classes through engineering school: one day I had a 9:00 a.m. appointment with someone at the university and was shocked to see the place crowded with people.

Poor Natalie has been contending with Bat-Boy for decades, and I don’t know how she does it, for she spends her mornings and afternoons basically alone. She says she’s content enough, and since I’ve proven ineffective at detecting her thoughts, I’ll have to believe her. She is not a compulsive radio listener like me (our nine radios are tuned to news most of the time but switch to country when the news gets consistently bad all at once) but she does seem to like silence. I think I may be headed that way myself.

In case anyone wants to know, the time is now 6:32 a.m. on July 15, 2024, which is to say that I haven’t been to sleep yet. I have washed tonight’s dishes, removed compostables to our trash-can composter, scritched a curious cat, and made a large pot of plum-pit jelly, including a fast cleanup of our stovetop. Natalie is sleeping off the effects of two consecutive dinner parties.

Eventually, I give up and come up to the nuptial sack sometime after sunrise, where I find her lying with her face under the pillow or otherwise shielded from the glorious sunlight that the Almighty and two hungry cats have conspired to stream through her window and thence upon her face.

She rolls over and I grab her around her waist. “Oh, hello,” says she in her sweet voice.

“I’d have fed the cats already but they hate me anyway,” I tell her. “They want you.”

She stretches and proffers a yawn comparable to a cat’s, or Mammoth Cave. “It’s going to stick open someday and provide a wildlife habitat,” I tell her. “Or else the fire department will have to figure out how to jack it closed.”

“You’ve been up all night, haven’t you?” she accuses.

Well, yes. And now she’s awakening, and I’m ready to collapse into bed. We exchange affection, she heads downstairs to welcome another day of virtue and good deeds, and I turn on the bedside radio, for I sleep better with background noise.

Nobody can ever understand someone else’s marriage.

Mark Kinsler, [email protected], haunts our little house in Lancaster along with Natalie and the two alley cats.

This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: We really need blackout window shades for the bedroom