Advice for insomniacs culled from my personal and family mythology:

I can sleep anywhere. When I was maybe six (I’m one of those people with memories that stretch deep into their childhood), I was sick and couldn’t eat dinner. It was around the attempt on the Pope’s life so I must have been about to turn seven. My mother had made fried chicken, my favorite, but I just wanted to sleep on the couch. I have a large family so dinner was noisy. But, I didn’t want to be by myself either since I was feeling so low.

I rolled my body into the crack between the seat cushions and the back of the couch and tried to go blank. I put my hand to my chest like a man in prayer and I turned inward to the darkness of the couch. In the turning motion I willed myself to sleep and it worked. Ever since then I have been able to project back into that memory and catch the shirttails of that slide into unconsciousness. I utilize that memory to get gone whenever some trauma would otherwise rob me of sleep.

I used to have terrible insomnia as a child, worrying about death and trying to make sense of being alive. My mother’s mother died when I was four. I remember being at the graveside and holding my mother’s hand, thinking of my eccentric grandmother, “as she, so I. Where is she now? Where will I go? Why any of this?” I’d been given the Christian version, but even then I had my doubts. I recall being pissed off about being a child again, some intuitive taste of a possible past life. I hated the powerlessness of being so small and was always impatient to be tall again.

We called my mother’s mother Mimire (mim-ear) in a French Canadian derivation of the French for Grandmother. She nailed coins to her floor so that people would be tricked into trying to pick them up. She had whoopee cushions under the couch pillows and she served fake ice cubes in her drinks, plastic insects visible inside them. She had a tablecloth lined with air hoses so she could make your plate jump or your glass spill. She was a trickster. She made dioramas and square dancing costumes. She was full of life and laughter. She yin’d my grandfather’s then dour yang.

She always gave me a silver dollar when I walked in the door and he always played the protestor, resisting and then giving in to the ritual. When she died of a heart attack the house froze, became itself a diorama of their life together at its last moments. From nineteen seventy-seven to nineteen ninety-seven nothing much changed except my slowly disappearing grandfather; who could hear less and less, but carved more and more. Either whittling or carving, he cut away from himself and the splinters would fall to the floor.

My uncle hooked a firehouse bell up to his telephone so he could feel the vibration. He didn’t like to wear his hearing aids. Pipier (pip-ear), from the French for grandfather, told me once that when he carved wood he could feel the spirits of dead carvers guiding his hands. He said we came from gypsies and that he had the power to stop bleeding at will by laying on his hands. He offered to teach my mother, but she refused on religious grounds. He showed me how to sleep so I too would have a long life. He lived ninety-seven summers, was a shipwright on the great lakes, worked the railroad to California and back, missed both wars by being too old for one and too young for the other, he stole his twin bother’s girl and eloped to Canada.

He worked much of his life hand carving photographic plates for the newspaper using mercury in methods now lost. People had come from a college to ask him how it was done and he refused to tell them, he would only pass it on to family. He had eighty-one descendants on the day he died, but none of them learned the method. It died with him.

I often find odd corollaries between my private life and the life of the nation. My father’s mother died the same week that Princess Diana did; suddenly the whole world was filled with mourning. There is rain and cold out side now, I’ve come down with a sinus infection that could turn into a nasty cold or lung infection if I’m not careful, my friends are in mourning over the election in which it feels to us that values of tolerance and equality were given a no confidence vote. All these mood mirrors reflect one another.

I have spent a fair amount of time this week trying to reorder my life post getting the boot from the HAC, but mainly I need to allow myself time in the bell, the decompression chamber where divers rest to acclimate to reduced surface pressure. If every thirty three feet of water equals the weight of another atmosphere pressing down on you, then my blood pumps with the density of a diver three years in the miles deep ocean trench. How long to decompress from that? What toxins do I need to release? There’s a risk in rising to fast, from the past, from one’s dreams, to the surface. Still, I hope soon to find fresh air I can freely breathe.

I am beginning again with a fresh piece of wood. I need to sit as my grandfather would and cut away from myself to see what hides beneath, what is essential and what can fall to the floor.