Category: True Stories

I’m writing this post on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.  I was 6 years old when this happened.  I remember seeing footage of the event on television at my grandmother’s house.  I was young enough at the time that I assumed everything I saw was live.  I was also confused enough to think that he was his brother John.  For years I told people that I remembered seeing the assignation of President Kennedy on live television.  When I started hearing people talk about him being killed at Dealey Plaza while riding in a convertible, I thought, “These people are wrong!” I know I saw him in the kitchen of that hotel!”  Book Depository? Grassy Knoll? I didn’t know anything about all that.  What I saw was probably on a Thursday morning news report instead of the “live” coverage I assumed I was seeing.  

I have recently started receiving several scam calls on my cell phone.  Most recently, they left the following message in my voicemail:

“Ignoring this will be an intentional second attempt to avoid initial appearance before a magistrate judge or a grand jury for a federal criminal offense.  Now this is the final attempt to reach you. To know your final case number and to speak to a federal agent, call back on 201-639-8895.  I repeat, it is 201-639-8995.”
 
This is the actual number they left.  I had received an identical message a week earlier from another phone number.  They were persistent and left 3 messages before I blocked their number.  I had a little time after I received this latest message and decided to give them a call back.  I thought it would be best to try and not call them from my cellphone, so I called from a land line.

In 1996, my family and I moved to a small town in middle Tennessee. I had been working in this new town for a couple of months before we were able to relocate the whole family to our new town.  I had been staying in a hotel while starting the new job.  On the day we were moving into our new home, I didn’t see my family until I stopped off during my lunch break.  We had movers doing our relocation which was a big help considering our move was over 4 hours away.  We also had two very small children at the time.

I have written several posts about my wife walking and talking in her sleep. Some of the more interesting things she has said like this had to do with times around when she had seizures. Nearly all these stories have taken place before our kids were born. They haven’t had the pleasure of being entertained by their mother talking in their sleep. Except one night when our oldest daughter wasn’t feeling good.  She came downstairs in the middle of the night to for something for a cough. Most kids want their mother when they don’t feel good and she was no exception.  She went and tapped her mom on the shoulder and asked her for something for her cough. My wife replied, “Put the shoe in the bucket!” That’s when my daughter came to my side of the bed, woke me up and told me what her mother said.

When my wife wakes me up in the middle of the night, it’s rarely for a good reason. One night she woke me up shouting “Feel of the wall!!”  I was sound asleep and wasn’t sure what she had said so when I asked she shouted again, “Feel of the wall!!” I assumed that she had been awake for a while and had a good reason for me to feel of the wall. So I reached through the headboard and placed my hand next to her hand, which was against the wall.  I didn’t feel anything unusual about the wall. Before I could comment or ask why we had our hands on the wall she said, “It’s sticky! And it stinks!”   That’s when I realized that she was asleep.

My wife has a reputation for doing and saying things in her sleep. This story took place in our first house. It was before our children were born. My wife has some nice cross-stitched pieces that she had done that were based on Norman Rockwell works. We had several of these hanging in our bedroom.  She had placed one on the wall on each side of our bed. She had another on the wall next to a window in our bedroom.  One night I woke up and I could see her standing next to this picture reaching up like she was taking it off the wall. I asked her what she was doing.  She said, “The man’s coming to get it!” I could tell from her response that she was asleep, so I got up and grabbed the picture to make sure she didn’t break it. I woke her up in the process. When I talked to her about this, she said she was having a dream. She was taking a certificate from a wall to give it to someone in the dream. It was a good think that I woke up when I did.

My wife doing something interesting while she was asleep has never been an every-night experience. But this story also takes place in our first apartment which we lived in for about a year. This particular night, we went to sleep as usual. She didn’t do or say anything special before I fell asleep. She didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night. The alarm clock went of the next morning and we were still laying in the bed. She sat up and asked me “What did you do with my gown?” She always slept in a gown and when I rolled over to look at her, I could see that she wasn’t wearing one. And she wasn’t wearing a smile either. I told I didn’t do anything with it, but she was convinced that I had undressed her in the middle of the night. She was mad at me until she found it folded up underneath her pillow.

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.

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.

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.