Last night, while I was doing the NYT crossword puzzle, I thought for a while that the answer to one of the clues might be the word for an inability to get to sleep. But I just couldn’t think of the word. (And the answer turned out to be something else anyway.) After I was finished, I turned off the light and went to bed — and then tossed and turned for an hour, unable to get to sleep because I was trying to remember the word for being unable to get to sleep.
Finally, I got up and went to lie down in the guest bedroom, thinking vaguely that a change of surrounding might work. And it did! I fell right to sleep. An hour later, though, I woke up totally disoriented. There was a box of stuff at my feet! Why did Marian replace Domino with a box of stuff? And there was no radio next to the bed. Why did Marian steal my radio?!? Then, just as I was feeling totally deranged, I shot up and realized where I was. A diffent room entirely. One without either a cat or a radio. Whew.
So I went back to my usual bedroom and fell back asleep. This morning, I woke up, went out to get the paper, and as I was halfway out to the sidewalk I suddenly thought, “Insomnia!” Jeebus. My brain is now officially defective.
This is a totally true story. It has nothing to do with cats, though, aside from Domino’s absence from the guest bedroom. And the fact that cats never seem to suffer from insomnia. Not ours, anyway, who are currently doing their best beached whale imitations. On Wednesday, however, they were out in the garden with us. On the left, Domino is examining one of our plants. On the right, Inkblot — who, unlike Domino, likes being held — is being hauled around while Marian searches for tomato worms. In this picture, I think he’s staring at Domino, who has just passed by his field of vision and is obviously up to something he feels he should know more about.
