I just need a little nap

All I need is a little sleep and I will be fine. At least that’s what I told a reporter who commented on my vague awareness of the activity around me, recently.
“I just need a good night’s rest.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said last week,” he replied.
I blinked at him sleepily. I did? I vaguely remembered saying something like that before, “yeah, I guess id did.” I promised myself that I would go to bed earlier that night.
However as everyone knows as long as the lights are on and I am actively involved with something I stay awake – usually.
There are a few exceptions like when I was dating. All those late night calls consumed far more time than I realized, especially since I was enrolled in summer school with reams of notes to take.
As the professor lectured, I wrote something continuously. Looking back over my notes I can easily discern when the sandman came: the pen kept moving, but my lies droop and the letters stretch out recording sleepy, meaningless nothingness.
I did not realize how little sleep I was getting until I had to take a written test.
Sitting in a quiet room on a hot summer day as the sun, and other student’s anxiety, slowly warmed the room was the perfect soporific. Test anxiety did not keep me awake. Right there in the middle of an important sociology exam my shoulders relaxed, my eyelids drooped.
I shook my head to wake up and puzzled my way through my list of sociology questions. I was not my usual, snappy self, reading, answering and moving along. I was falling asleep in the middle of an exam worth one-third of my grade. I fumbled my way through to a passing grade in summer school.
Once I got married and settled down into family living, of course, I no longer nodded off in the middle of lectures — instead I began nodding off during Sunday morning sermons.
Well not nodding off, “just resting my eyes,” a my mother-in-law explained when she went to church with us one Sunday. Fighting fluttering eye lids is a lot of work on a day when we are commanded to take a Sabbath rest.
Hmm … if I’ve ever been in a service where the sermon was on obeying that command, I was probably resting my eyes and missed it.
Recently I discovered stay awake during services: Take a short nap before church. Now why didn’t I think of that when we had a house full of children to round up on Sunday mornings?
Sleeping in church I understand: After all I’m just sitting there, not doing anything. What I have never understood were the times I drifted off as a I read exciting children’s adventure books, aloud to my children. My children never dozed off, not in all the years I read books aloud to them before naps or bedtime, but I did, right in the middle of a sentence. If they didn’t need an afternoon nap, I did.
Those days are long gone, but there are still afternoons, like today, when along about 3 p.m. as I key words into the computer, the words blur and I fight off the yawns. I just need a 10-minute nap and I’ll be just fine … yawn, I promise.