But I'm not tired!

When I was small, I took naps in the afternoon. But I didn't want to take naps in the afternoon. "I'm not tired!" my mom says I would tell her. And so she brought out a Mom trick: "Just lie down for ten minutes," she'd say, "and then you can come back downstairs." And so I'd go to bed for ten minutes.

Two hours later, I'd call down the stairs, "Has it been ten minutes yet?"

"About two more to go," she'd say.

"OK!" And I'd go trotting back into my room to read a book or something. I can remember the bright sun of those afternoons, coming in through the high windows in my bedroom. A few minutes later, I'd go downstairs.

Tonight, I would kind of like it if my mom were here to tell me, "Just lie down for ten minutes"; too much of me is fighting against the heaviness of my eyes, petulant and protesting.

source for tonight's image: Choo Choo's Online, a pretty great-looking source for train toys. I'll say more about loving trains some other time, when I'm not trying to convince myself to sleep; for now, all you need to know--in case you didn't have the good fortune to grow up in a train town--is that Chessie System's logo is the profile of a sleeping kitten, tucked in a blanket, and thus wins the contest (which no one even knew we were having) for cutest train logo, hands down. Won it many years ago, in fact. Sometimes, when my brother and I were little, we would end up sitting in the Malibu with Mom waiting for a train to pass; I always liked the Chessie System cars best.