Lori Borgman

My husband is one of those people who can sleep anywhere, anytime.

He can sleep sprawled halfway on and halfway off the sofa, in a straight-back chair with three grands crawling all over him styling his hair, and during cross-country flights with severe turbulence.

It’s a gift. The man is so gifted he can even fall asleep while I’m talking to him.

I do not have the gift of sleep.

The dark circles under my eyes are green with envy.

Now, I am more sleepless than ever after reading about a study from China linking “sleep irregularity” to an increased risk of 172 diseases.

Yes, I did read it right before crawling into bed.

After tossing and turning and pummeling my pillow, I was finally drifting off when I heard a toilet flush and remembered that kidney disease and urinary incontinence are linked to poor sleep. Maybe I should get up and drink some water. Of course, if I did that, I could be getting up again a few hours later.

I put kidney disease and incontinence out of my mind, which meant I had 170 more poor sleep-related diseases to go.

I threw the covers over to his side, was semi-comfortable again and heard my left knee pop. It’s a Rice Krispy knee that often snaps, crackles and pops.

Poor sleep is also linked to bone fractures. Maybe I just fractured my knee. Is that possible? Just when I convinced myself I didn’t have a fractured knee and was feeling drowsy, all the diseases linked to poor sleep began racing through my head like a thoroughbred at the Preakness . . . gangrene, fibrosis, cirrhosis of the liver.

Respiratory failure, heart disease, obesity, diabetes mellitus . . . I was on a runaway train destined for insomnia.

If only visions of sugar plums would dance in my head.

I may not have the gift of sleep, but I do have the gift of waking up. I can tell myself what time to wake up, and I do. I’ve been able to do this my entire adult life.

The next time you can’t sleep, try thinking about what time you want to wake up. I can tell you from first-hand experience, it  wo  r    k

 

We just dropped some serious money on an air purifier thinking it might help with my allergies. I have seasonal allergies. They’re only bad in fall, winter, spring and summer.

I do a lot of sniffing.

Somedays I sniff, hack and cough so much that if you heard it from another room, you’d think an old ranch hand was choking on chewing tobacco and holler to see if the guy was all right.

Everyone is used to me sniffing and coughing. Nobody hollers to ask if I’m all right. That one was decided a long time ago.

If the air purifier works some magic and helps my allergies, it’s possible I could have more energy. I might win more games of Mancala and chess with the grands. I might even be able to reach dishes on the top shelf in the kitchen without having to stand on a chair.

Clearly, I expect a lot for my money.

Not only is our air purifier supposed to help with allergies, but it is also supposed to rid the house of cooking odors. The leaflet that came with it says it will rid the house of bacon, pizza and meatloaf smells.

The cooking smell I’d like to eliminate is salmon. When I cook salmon, I throw open the windows, which lets the salmon smell out and clouds of pollen in.

Salmon tastes good, but it’s not a scent you’re going to dab behind your ears or want to permeate your clothes.

My better half and I were talking about all the different ways people fragrance their bodies—creams, lotions, cologne, deodorant, hair products, hand sanitizers. There are so many different scents and fragrances interacting on one body it’s a wonder we don’t spontaneously combust.

We even load up our homes and cars with fragrances: pomegranate rose water dish soap, mandarin coriander laundry soap (do you cook with it or wash your clothes in it?) calm and bliss-scented fabric softeners. Scented outlet plugs like almond croissant, salted butterscotch and warm apple pie enable you to fragrance while you sleep. I’m afraid I’d wake up and immediately want to start baking. Or eating. Or both.

The husband said, “Do you know what I think a house should smell like?”

“What?” I said.

“Bacon.”

I didn’t respond.

I just let it hang in the air. Along with the salmon and pollen.

Oh well. At least I have a gift idea for his birthday – bacon-scented plug-in air fresheners for the house. He’ll be in hog heaven.

We used to tell our kids to act their age. Now they tell us to act our age. We try, but it’s not easy when you are twenty-somethings trapped inside the bodies of seasoned citizens.

The husband spent five days last fall channeling Paul Bunyan, swinging an axe at the roots on a 60-year-old maple tree that a removal service had taken down. In addition to getting most of the roots out, he got two frozen shoulders, a wrist injury, steroid injections and months of physical therapy.

Not to be left out, I injured my back lunging over a seat in a moving SUV to retrieve a coffee mug. The vault went well but my landing was a disaster. I pose no threat to Simone Biles.

We are now trying (at least temporarily) to time our heavy lifting to whenever someone younger stops by. We don’t tag just anybody. We size ‘em up, study their spines, guess how much they can lift and whether they’ll sue us if something goes wrong.

We had new gutter filters installed last week. We signed the paperwork, offered the installer a lemonade and swiped our credit card. The installer hadn’t been out the door for five seconds when the husband charged after him on a dead run.

He caught the fella just in time to help move some heavy patio furniture back into place.

We have a huge hedge that requires being on a ladder and leaning over somewhat precariously to give it a flattop. Our son often spends the night on his way to and from jobsites in the area but usually arrives late at night and leaves before dawn. We’re not sure how the neighbors would feel about electric hedge trimmers buzzing while they sleep.

On the upside, if a delivery guy has a heavy box and I see him coming, most of the time he will gladly set it in the front hall.

Our house is on a crawl space that needs checking every year or so to make sure it is dry. To get in the crawl, you remove a metal partition from a window well, drop down on your arms and squeeze through the opening like a gator. We presented this opportunity to two grandsons as an adventure that would be second only to camping in the Rockies with no adult supervision.

They slithered down, reported the crawl was bone dry and emerged with a dead mouse. Naturally, other grands wanted to go down, but when the boys told them there weren’t any more mice, they lost interest.

We are now eyeing a large, worn, matted area rug in the family room that anchors an extremely heavy sofa sleeper. We may have to wait until the entire family comes for Thanksgiving.

I’m stealth about slipping outside each morning to retrieve newspapers from the driveway. I dread someone driving by, lowering their window and yelling, “Get with the times!”

Oh, darlin’, we’re with the Times—and the Journal and the Star and the News. Two papers in print and four online.

Back when an apple was still a fruit and nobody ever heard of the internet, every house on both sides of the block got a morning newspaper. Today, we are the only house on the block to get a newspaper in the driveway. We might be the only ones in the whole subdivision.

Paper and print are part of our history. We met in college. He was a graduate teaching assistant in the photo lab and I was an undergrad. We met in the darkroom to see what would develop.

We bonded over newsprint, halftones, the deafening roar of offset presses and the smell of darkroom chemicals.

I grew up in a home that received a newspaper in the morning and another in the evening. Mom and Dad had the same thing every day for breakfast: coffee, buttered toast and the morning paper.

They had the same conversation every day, too.

He’d say: “You don’t need to read that to me; I just read it.”

Then she’d say: “Ok, but did you read this—”

Then they’d trade sections.

After dinner, it was the same thing all over again, but without the buttered toast.

My husband’s first job was delivering newspapers door to door on his bicycle. As a girl, I poured through the Women’s section on lazy Sunday afternoons vicariously attending weddings of strangers, learning where they were from, who their parents were, how the groom planned on earning a living, where they would live, and how long the train on the bride’s wedding gown was.

A great aunt used to make sailor hats from newspapers, clean windows with them and wrap tomatoes in need of ripening in them. Newsprint was a multi-use tool.

Newspapers took us through the assassination of JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and the horrors of 9/11.

And now? Newspapers in print are novelties — like turntable record players and 35 mm manually-focus cameras.

Before any big family gathering, the husband tears out pages with comics, the crosswords, Sudoku and word puzzles. A son-in-law and half-dozen grandkids charge through the front door and make wild grabs for them. There’s often a cluster working to solve for 61 across: solid fossil fuel.

Yes, you can find everything in print online, but there’s just something about a newspaper in your hands. Maybe it’s the feel or the crinkle. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of wrestling that monster into position. You bat back a page, snap it behind another, give it a shake, fold the whole kit and caboodle and are ready to read. Newspaper aerobics.

Some may think people who still get a newspaper in print are relics. We prefer to think of ourselves as affectionate historians.

A woman once emailed to invite me to join her book club for lunch at a country club in Malibu. She offered to reserve a parking spot for me near the front door. It was a lovely gesture, but it would have been a 2,100-mile drive.

The trip would have taken four days, maybe five. I stop a lot for Diet Cokes.

Another reader wrote expressing surprise to learn I lived near her in Idaho.

I was surprised, too, because I do not live in Idaho. I know this for sure because another reader wrote to say she was glad to know I live in upstate New York.

I do not.

A woman once recognized me in a grocery store, introduced herself, named the neighborhood where she thought I lived and the church she thought I attended. When I told her where I lived and that I had never been to that church, she looked disappointed and said, “Well, that’s not what I heard.”

Mistaken identity and misinformation can grow tangled on my end as well. A reader once sent an email and mentioned aging, losing her spouse, living alone and having to downsize. She also noted that tomorrow would be 102.

I marveled to the husband that a woman about to turn 102 was writing thoughtful emails and navigating life online. Then I reread the email, noted she lived in Arizona and realized she would not be 102, the temperature would be 102.

It is humbling when readers take time to shoot an email into cyberspace just to say hello or to inquire as to whether we might be neighbors. I try to answer all the emails but sometimes fall behind and miss a few.

For the record, we live in Indianapolis and, what’s more, nobody we live next to gets all that excited about us. But then, most of us have known one another for years, or decades, and in several cases 40 years.

We’ve shared life through kids, graduations, weddings, deaths of parents and the arrival of grandbabies.

We’ve shared extension ladders, snowblowers, garden produce and chatter about the house down the street now on the market.

If you have been fortunate to have good neighbors, you know that good neighbors often become good friends and good friends become like family.

We stay in touch with the neighbors we had as newlyweds in Oregon in the late ‘70s. They lived in one half of the duplex, and we lived in the other. Their two adorable little girls were the inspiration for starting our own family.

We saw them on a trip to the Pacific Northwest last year and drove to the duplex where our friendship began. The place was a trainwreck that elicited gasps of shock and bursts of laughter. Cars were parked in the front yard, the siding was layered in moss and mold, and a rusted grill and mostly empty bag of charcoal sat on the front step.

Times and places may change, but the good memories last forever.

 

Our primary care doctor announced he is joining a concierge practice and invited us to follow him. We were excited, thinking this meant luxurious fluffy white robes in the exam room and 500-thread-count cotton sheets on the table instead of that crinkly deli wrap paper.

Visions of coffee bars danced in our heads. The concierge practice could keep our specialty coffee orders on file along with our cholesterol counts and lists of prescription meds.

I ventured there would probably be a masseuse and spa, too. “Where there’s a spa, there’s a shower,” I said.

“YES!” the husband shouted. “Free little soaps, shampoos and conditioners!”

We wondered if a concierge practice also included valet parking. If there was valet parking, there probably would be fitness-focused excursions—maybe even free membership to a pickleball court.

We were living the dream — until the dream crashed.

After further reading, several voicemail messages, and a slick mailing with a QR code for a video, we learned a concierge practice is where a doctor limits the patient load, guarantees a call back within 24 hours and focuses on preventive care, not just treating illnesses.

In exchange for an annual fee.

Annual means you pay it every year.

Several thousand dollars.

Per warm body.

There’s a shortage of primary care doctors and it is projected to worsen. More and more people are paying annual fees to see a doctor. Luxury concierge practices (the ones that do have fluffy towels and coffee bars) charge as much as $50,000. Our doctor was charging nowhere near that. But still.

If the husband lives as long as his dad did – until almost 98—his concierge fees alone could equal the price of a nice new car. Adjusted for inflation, it could be two new cars and a boat.

We love our doctor. His changing practices rips my heart out. (I’ll need a cardiologist for that.) We were some of his first patients when he began practicing. He gave us his home phone number in case we needed to reach him in an emergency.

We understand why he’s switching to a different practice. We’ll miss him.

Our main concern in choosing a new health professional is age. That’s right, we discriminate and are up front about it. We want doctors who are going to outlive us.

We both made appointments with a new fella. Mine was yesterday. I couldn’t tell his age from the picture online and was eager to see how old he looked.

He swung open the door, said, “Hello” and extended his hand. I instinctively cried, “You’re young! You’re about the age of our son. He’s 43.”

He smiled and said, “I’m 41.”

I think we’re gonna like him.

We had a good-size crowd together this week. Three out-of-town grands and six grands who live in town, met up for three consecutive days. We rotated from house to house to house so that no one house would be singled out as a disaster area.

Due to the size, volume and rapid movement of the group, my intelligence gathering was limited to random conversations bits floating above the crowd or one-on-one exchanges in the car.

In the car: “Grandma, it’s easier to leave your house faster than ours because you don’t have to put up the dogs. If we don’t put them up, they eat all the food.”

“You mean they eat all the dog food?”

“No, they eat apples, avocados and bananas. Our lab can peel a banana!”

(Note to self: remember that the next time you’re at their house and they offer you a banana.)

Overheard: Nine cousins are about to eat lunch, then go to a neighborhood pool. A seven-year-old prays before lunch: “Dear God, thank you for this day and this food and please let us be the only kids at the pool.”

In the car: “Grandma, what does ‘occupado’ mean?”

“It’s Spanish for occupied. Sometimes you see it in English and Spanish on restroom doors like on planes. Why?”

“It’s what my dad says when he’s in the bathroom and the door is closed.”

Overheard: Three of the nine kids heading to a creek stomp did not bring boots. One of the kids yells, “Well, you can go barefoot in the creek, can’t you?”

“Mom says we’re not allowed to,” comes the answer.

Then another says, “Yeah, but Dad lets us!”

Overheard at the creek: A country cousin says to a city cousin, “I can bring frog eggs next time I come so you can catch frogs.”

Two of the older cousins, not present because they are at a church camp in Louisiana, send a text: “We took a boat ride on a river and saw an alligator. Did you know if you take a selfie with an alligator, you only have a 50% chance of survival?”

Nobody wants to ask which side of 50 they think they are in.

Early morning in the kitchen: Standing in front of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, juggling ice cream bars, fruit pops and ice cream sandwiches to get at some ice, a small voice behind me says, “If you’re trying to clear that out, I can help by eating some for you.”

They’re all gone now — the kids, the dirt, the crud on the countertops, the wet swimsuits, water blasters, flip flops, soggy towels, butterfly nets and every last grass clipping stuck to the bathtub.

Like summer itself, the time passed all too quickly.

By the way, there were no other kids at the pool that day.

 

Hydration has officially become the cure for whatever ails us.

Feeling sluggish? Hydrate! Dry skin? Hydrate! Joints hurt? Hydrate! High blood pressure? Hydrate? Ingrown toenail? Hydrate! Don’t know what to make for dinner? Hydrate!

To join the wave of adequate hydration, one of our daughters thoughtfully gifted me with a pink XXL insulated water tumbler with an 18-inch straw. It’s like a sippy cup for giants.

My water bottle is so enormous it looks like something I would carry to do a triathlon. So far, my greatest distance has been from the kitchen to the garage.

When my XXL water tumbler is wedged into the cupholder in our car’s console, there’s no room for the husband’s coffee. Poor guy. With hot coffee in hand, he now makes left and right turns very slowly.

Not only does it take more time to turn, it takes more time to get anywhere. It now takes us three and a half-hours for a three-hour drive, due to more frequent stops.

For the record, the number of public restrooms has not increased in proportion to the number of giant water containers in use. Go ahead and drink more but prepare to stand in line longer. I now regret every family trip we ever took when I told one of the kids to “just hold it!”

The real debate in the water craze is not whether to drink, but how much to drink. Recommendations range from one-third of your body weight in fluid ounces to your full body weight in fluid ounces.

A Harvard website floats the idea of 4-6 cups a day, while a UK medical website treads water suggesting 6-8 cups a day. Will Americans rise to the challenge?

The ones who go pro in the name of hydration are the folks carrying gallon-size water bottles. Talk about a win-win. You can hydrate and tone your arms all at the same time.

At this rate, water tumblers will soon be the size of 32-gallon trash cans and require PVC pipes for a straw.

I do drink more with my new XXL tumbler, but it’s so big and clunky it often stays anchored to the kitchen counter. It doesn’t go with me, I go to it.

The real question in the matter of healthy hydration is not how much I should drink, but how much can I drink before I explode?

The man of the house is tall, lean, and so bald that his head shines almost as much as his smile. He worked law enforcement all his career. As a state trooper, he once rescued the Beatles from crazed fans after a St. Louis concert.

He worked for the federal government as well, something to do with organized crime and exploding body parts. I don’t ask for details; I just nod. He served with the Secret Service under Presidents Ford, Clinton, “Daddy Bush” and Vice-President Dan Quayle. Barbara Bush was his favorite even though she wasn’t a president.

He’s retired now, mastering the art of gardening and the go-to guy if you have concerns about a tree. Rabbits eating the bark off your dogwood? Call him.

Writing is his chief enjoyment. He’s written 29 books, none of them published. That doesn’t diminish his enthusiasm one semi-colon, nor should it. A lot of good writers are never published, and some published writers aren’t all that good. He prints out his manuscripts, tucks them in three-ring binders and passes them among friends who receive his creations with delight.

At the center of his writing room sits a stately desk with a brass lamp, a desk pad, a pencil holder and a day calendar. The desk sits in front of windows that frame lush greenery and channel oceans of soft, natural light.

The center desk drawer is organized with precision. A divided tray holds a solar calculator, Post-it notes, mechanical pencil refills, scissors, a pink highlighter, a magnifying glass and a small compartment in the middle containing 40 brightly colored paper clips: turquoise, sky blue, hot pink, lime green, white and neon yellow.

Nobody touches the paper clips. He says that with a smile, probably the same smile he wore when he yelled, “MOVE IT!” at the Beatles.

Not even he uses the paper clips. “Those are special,” he says. “I won’t use them. I’m still emotional.”

The paper clips were a gift when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer and underwent 40 radiation treatments. The clips were linked together and hung on the kitchen wall. After each radiation treatment, he and his wife would return home and, because he was so utterly exhausted, she would remove a paper clip.

Each blast of radiation was followed by one less paper clip.

It didn’t look like progress at first. Slowly, gradually the chain began to shrink.

They monitored it when they sat down for a meal, skipped a meal because he was too sick to eat, or when they walked to the garage to head out for another treatment.

One of my most beloved theologians, Ray Stedman, once wrote, “Suffering is part of the program.” Who was better acquainted with suffering than Christ? It was the path to resurrection and life after death.

Most of us subconsciously acknowledge that suffering is part of the program—particularly for others. Then we are shocked when we find ourselves in that equation.

Nobody escapes this life unscathed. Everybody goes through something.

When darkness falls, your steps falter and the path ahead is frightening, keep inching forward, keep believing, keep praying.

The path through suffering is one paper clip at a time.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have air conditioning until we moved from Nebraska to Missouri. People in Nebraska used open windows and fans to cool a house back in the day.

My Aunt Adeline, a resourceful woman, cooled a big house, a husband and six kids, with nothing but a bowl of ice in front of a window fan. That was the Cornhusker version of air conditioning.

There were pitiful looks when people learned we were moving to Missouri, a place many considered Deep South. It was only 200 miles south, but south is south.

From all the talk, it sounded as though the heat down South was so bad that people melted like butter in the summer. They could be sitting in their cars, at the kitchen table, going for the mail or picking tomatoes when—bam!—they melted into a large puddle of clarified butter.

We moved south in August and, as predicted, each day was red hot wrapped in a suffocating blanket of humidity. At night, we slept (more like drifted in and out of consciousness) with a very old and very large oscillating floor fan humming at the end of the hallway by the bedrooms.

That big fan went wherever we went. If we were in the kitchen, the fan was in the kitchen. If we moved to the living room, the fan moved to the living room. The fan was a constant and welcome presence.

The next summer, Mom and Dad bought a window air conditioner and the large oscillating fan quietly moved to the basement. We gave the old fan a friendly nod whenever we went down to do laundry or retrieve something from the freezer, but it was largely ignored and soon forgotten.

The new AC window unit shot arctic air directly at the kitchen table. We ate every meal with our winter coats on. To get cold air back to the bedrooms, it ran full blast at night, which meant there were often icicles hanging from the kitchen appliances in the mornings.

A few years later, Mom and Dad had central air installed. Life would never be the same. There was no hum of the fan or roar of the window AC. The entire house stayed comfortably cool without constant background noise. What’s more, we could eat meals without coats on.

Our kids have never known life without air conditioning, nor have their kids. When one of our daughters and her family moved to a different house, a friend brought lunch for the entire crew on moving day. She also brought an oscillating stand fan, knowing all the traipsing in and out would heat the house.

“It’s an oscillated what?” shrieked one of the kids. The woman lugged the fan into the kitchen, set it upright, raised the pole and plugged it in.

The kids immediately put their red-cheeked sweaty faces directly in front of the blowing fan. As they talked, they realized the fan warped and amplified their voices.

They sang and screeched using all the weird voices they could muster. For the rest of the day, not one of the passed the fan without stopping to cool off and singing a few bars.

“Hey, Grandma!” one of them shouted, “Did you know about these fans?”

“I did know about them,” I said. “That’s how your grandma became cool.”