Sunday Morning

Sunday morning. The universal day of sleeping in. Everywhere people are having a good scratch, a small snore, and turning over for another hour’s sleep.

Not here.

We may be living in the magical land of retirement, but at our house the wake-up call comes early every single morning.

 There are several factors at play. 

  

    

 Factor #1   

 Small (or shrinking with age) bladder. 

You first have a dream in which every toilet is either unavailable or unusable. In this dream there is usually an audience, further restricting your hope for relief. (Probably just as well, this being a dream and you actually being in bed.)

     You then wake up and lie there, taking stock of just how urgent your need is. Could you ignore nature’s call and catch a few more winks? No.  You surrender and stumble to the bathroom with only one eye open in order to ease your return to the land of Nod.

     This trip also serves a second purpose, to relieve the second factor:

Factor #2 

   The lodger who arrived a few years ago, refuses to leave, and whose presence is growing more pronounced with each day.

Mr. Arthritis. 

You climb into bed in the evening feeling pretty darn chipper. You’ve been fairly active all day, climbing stairs, pulling weeds, hanging laundry.

During the night, however, you become the Tin Man.

Joints that were kept warm and happy by all that movement during the day have turned on you. As the years have gone by, your cartilage has taken on the profile of an anorexic teen, growing thinner by the day. As a result, your joints have been getting up close and personal with each other, and like your relatives at Thanksgiving, are rubbing each other the wrong way.       
This is most apparent at night, when that familiar sharp pain in your hip arrives at about 4 or 5 a.m. and

There. Is. No. position. On. Earth. That. Makes. It. Go. Away.

    

Movement sometimes helps, and flailing a leg around in bed with a

few scissor kicks will loosen things up, but this isn’t usually received very enthusiastically by anyone else who happens to be within a three-foot radius of you.

          Thus, the one positive aspect of Factor #1.

Factor #3 

The Cat That Will Not Be Ignored

5:00 a.m. – The first incursion. This is pretty low-key, consisting mostly of padding around on the bed or curling up next to you.

5:30 a.m. – The sound of water being lapped – loudly – from the nearby bathroom toilet.

6:00 a.m. – More padding around on the bed. And around. And around.

6:15 a.m. – Heart-stopping mews/yowls from the floor. Satchel is now almost completely deaf, and like other hard-of-hearing members in his age group, has no idea how LOUD he is.

6:30 a.m. – More mews/yowls from the bathroom down the hall where some inconsiderate person left the toilet seat down, making it difficult for him to get to the water in that toilet, which of course is better than the water in the first toilet.

6:45 a.m. – All-around, purposeless, mews/yowls emitted at four and a half minute intervals, just enough time in between for you to   a  l  m  o  s  t

drop off.

7:00 a.m. – Generalized stamping around on the bed, wet nudging of any body part not covered by the sheet, and the piece de resistance – pawing reading glasses to the floor with a crash.

Once up, we go downstairs where Satchel smells his dry food, ignores the fresh canned we ladle out, and settles down for a morning nap.