My wife has left us. All alone. For four days.
It’s Day Two and we have already descended into chaos. Pray
for me.
I try to see the bright side of situations, but this one is
tough. Sure, we get to eat out a lot, but that’s expensive. Sure, we could not
shower and spend all day in our underwear, but they require you to wear pants at
Chick-fil-A, and will insist that you leave immediately if you aren’t. We found
that out the hard way.
As near as I can tell, there is only one pure upside to my
wife being gone – I get to sleep on the hump.
You see, I’m in the second half of my forties, or the “complete
physical breakdown” period, as it’s known. Some random part of my body is either
hurting, aching, or simply not working correctly at any given moment of every
single day. The only thing keeping me alive and marginally mobile is sleep.
A good night’s sleep depends on four main factors:
1) Making sure your kids are sleeping somewhere other than
in your house.
2) Making sure your dog is sleeping somewhere other than in
your house.
3) Having demonstrated the willingness to shoot randomly out
of your upstairs windows at the first sign of late-night disturbances, thus
eliminating loud parties and street racing in your neighborhood.
4) A good bed.
Of these four essential ingredients, a good bed is arguably the
most important factor for an aging male, such as myself, since I’m mostly deaf
at this point anyway. But having a good bed is not as foolproof as it sounds.
At least not for me and my wife.
We have two main problems when shopping for a bed, stemming
mostly from the fact that we’re both “frugal”:
A) Neither of us want to pay the Maserati-ish ticket price
for the “premium-grade” mattress, even though we both need the premium-grade mattress.
B) Neither of us want to buy a new mattress after the
recommended seven to ten years, because even after fifteen years, “we just bought
this one!”
So there, in the master suite, sits a probably ten-plus-year-old
“standard entry-grade” king-size mattress that has only one thing going for it –
the hump in the middle.
By sleeping on our respective sides all these years, the
weight and heat of our bodies have worked to shift many of the standard
entry-grade mattress molecules to the middle of the bed. There, due again to
the effects of pressure and heat, much like how diamonds are created deep within
our earth’s crust, the sub-par mattress molecules have fused together into a
magical longitudinal mass of premium mattress molecules, known as “the hump.”
The hump is a mattress within a mattress, if you will. It’s
a three-foot-wide section of platinum mattress, hiding in plain sight in the
middle of our old, worn out bronze model.
The hump is not available to me on regular nights, because
if I tried to sleep there, I would be touching my wife while we slept, which
would throw her delicate nighttime temperature regulation system completely out
of whack, activating her “kick violently until the temperature regulation system
gets back on track” reflex, which puts me in great nighttime physical peril.
So, the hump is only available when the king-size bed is
single-occupancy, and this week, that single occupant is me.
When I woke up this morning, my hip didn’t even hurt. I feel
like I’m forty-three again!
Happy hump day.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen
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