Attack of the 50 Foot Blog – Page 26

Earrings

My wife and I were still in that first apartment when I had my next encounter with her doing things in her sleep. She had a very nice pair of diamond earrings that someone in her family had given to her as a Christmas gift. She was very careful not to sleep in these earrings. One night, we had been in the bed for a short time. I was drifting off to sleep when she nudged me and handed me her earrings to put on our only nightstand which was on my side of the bed. The next morning when we were getting up, she reached up to her ears and said, “Where are my earrings?” I told her that she had given them to me the night before I and showed them to her on the nightstand. She had no memory of giving them to me.

The Blinds

My wife and I had not been married that long until I found out that she would occasionally walk or talk in her sleep. The very first time I remember her doing anything like this was when we were in our first apartment. She fell asleep before I did but we hadn’t been in bed that long. All of a sudden she shouted, “Dammit Arthur, Close the Blinds!” I like to sleep in a dark room. I wouldn’t have gotten in bed unless I thought the blinds were closed enough to make the room as dark as possible. But as a newlywed that wanted to make everything right for my bride, I dutifully got up and tried to close them a little more. It was when I got back in the bed that realized she was asleep and had been when she shouted at me.

Falling Slats

When I was growing up, I slept in a twin bed. This is the same bed I talked about in a previous post where I talk about not being a sleepwalker. This bed had 4 slats under the boxed springs. One of these slats didn’t fit that well and would occasionally fall out when I was moving in the bed. The boxed springs didn’t shift. The provided no real purpose other than to make a very loud noise when it hit the tile floor in my room.

I Am Not A Sleepwalker

I am not a sleepwalker. I have never been one to get up in the middle of the night while I was not awake. The closest I ever came to sleepwalking was one evening when I was still in elementary school. I woke up and found myself sitting up in the bed. I wasn’t dreaming about getting up or sitting up. I don’t remember that I was dreaming about anything at all. I briefly considered what was going on and decided to aggressively fall back onto my pillow.

Everything I Know About Polka

Growing up in rural West Tennessee, I wasn’t exposed to very much polka music. For years my only real exposure to polka was the occasional Myron Floren song on the Lawrence Welk Show. My next exposure to polka that had any impact on me was when a Camelot Music store opened at our local mall. This store had a wider variety of albums than the JC Penny and Sears stores in the mall. They even had an international section that included a few polka albums. I never listened to them, but I could tell from their album artwork, the accordion figured into polka music. “Weird Al” Yankovic was probably my next exposure with his occasional polka versions of rock songs but I don’t think that should really count. The Shmenge Brothers skits on the SCTV television show was probably the most authentic exposure to real polka although I didn’t really appreciate it. It wasn’t until I saw the Big Joe Polka Show that I got a real idea of what polka was about.

I Buckle My Belt

I drove a Chevy S-10 pickup truck for years. This truck had a standard transmission. When my kids were young, it was a rare occasion that any of them would ride in the truck with me, especially by the time we had more than one kid. The problem was fitting more than one car seat in the small cab of this truck. On the rare occasion when I would put two car seats in the truck, there was barely enough room for me to sit. And when I did get in the truck, it was difficult to reach the stick to shift gears. It was just easier to use my wife’s vehicle when I needed to go anywhere with the kids.

Folder Story

Back when my son was in school, he had an assignment that he needed to put in a folder. He was upstairs in our house one evening and shouted down to his mother to tell her that he needed a folder. He didn’t need the folder immediately, but my wife didn’t know this. Additionally, she had just gotten home from the store where she could have picked one up for him.

Bingo

When my youngest daughter was little, she liked to sing. While all my children have musical talent, she is the one who continues to play. She is the most outgoing of my kids and has always been more likely to sing in public. At family gatherings, she would occasionally sing my song Wild Man in the Desert while my son and I would accompany her on guitars. But like most kids, she was more likely to sing children’s songs that she heard on the variety of recordings and videos she watched.

Feeding the Multitudes

I’ve had more than one person ask me about the lyrics to my song Water into Wine. The confusion is around the difference in the lyrics when I’m singing about Jesus feeding the multitudes. Early in the song the lyrics are:

“He fed five thousand people
With five small loaves of bread
Two fish was all the meat they had
But everyone was fed”

Later in the song, I sing the following:

“He fed four thousand people
With seven loaves of bread
A few small fish was all the meat they had
But everyone was fed”

Reading the Bible

Most of my religious songs are based on specific stories from the Bible. This is the main reason that the title of my first CD was Bible Stories. My motivation for writing these songs comes from a desire to share the stories from a different perspective, usually the view of someone on the sidelines in the story. I will at least choose a character in the story that usually doesn’t have much of a voice in the story that we read. I credit my familiarity with these stories to years of reading the Bible. I haven’t always been a Bible reader. There are a couple of key moments in my life that brought me to the point where I am today and the way that I look at Bible Stories.