My wife is going away this weekend, and while I will of course miss her, I am looking forward to one very special thing. Well, yes, playoff football, but also something else. I knew I had articulated this phenomenon before, so I dug back into the archives – way back to 2019, the pre-COVID days if you can even imagine. Here’s what has me excited about this weekend:
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 © 2024 Marc Schmatjen
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