Sunday Morning

Today is a Sunday. I am sitting in my room, listening to the Magdalen College Choir (having already enjoyed several albums each of Casting Crowns and L’Angelus) and reading. I have been to Mass and Adoration, and enjoyed a doughnut with friends after Mass (We did not all enjoy the same doughnut, naturally. They enjoyed different doughnuts than I did.) I have given an unexpected gift to someone (I hope they like it. hee-hee! ;-D ), I have talked with several of my family members on the phone, I have written several blogs (this being one of them) and I have finished “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys” which I HIGHLY recommend. Now I am patiently savoring Brother David Steindl-Rast’s book “Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer.” It was recommended by a good friend, and I can already see why. So far I have only read the first chapter, and cannot even express it in prose. It requires poetry. Something like this:

Let us go into the woods, you and I,
Just us; and let us be surprised
And see things as they are, and know
That they are thus, and good, because He wills them so.

Horribly trite, but that is what comes to me on the spur of the moment, as it were. It works for me and I really don’t much care what anyone else thinks about it.

As an added anomaly, I am drinking coffee in order not to be drowsy as I read. I was literally falling asleep in the middle of the page, at 5:00 in the afternoon. That is very untypical of me, but there is a reason for it. Allow me to share the story with you…

Of course it begins with Friday night when I didn’t go to bed at all until nearly 2:00 in the morning. There was a good reason for that. And I’m sure there is a good reason for the fact that I cannot sleep once the sun starts shining, which it does around 5:00 A.M. in these parts. But one night of hardly any sleep is no great shakes to me. The icing on the cake came this morning, at about 3:30 when I awoke to hear the front door opening (I am a light sleeper) and women’s voices downstairs. Since no women live in this house I was a little confused until I listened to what they were saying. I realized that two of my roommates, S and J, had brought home a couple of girls from the bar. I shook my head and tried to go back to sleep. I must have succeeded because I was only vaguely aware that the voices moved up the stairs and into the hall outside my bedroom. What snapped me to full wakefulness was the sound of my bedroom door being opened and S shouting, “No! Don’t go in there!” But it was too late.

Something not many people know about me is that I possess the ability to come instantly awake like an animal, from total slumber to total wakefulness, in absolutely zero time. There are a few triggers that can bring on this reaction, and one of them is a door opening (I come awake before because I had heard the front door open on the other side of the house and downstairs.) So before the door was even half way open I was already awake and in full on action mode. I tossed the blanket to one side and threw myself out of the bed onto my feet, snatching up the pistol I keep on the box next to the bed. The intruder screamed and jumped back into the hall. I stepped into the doorway of my room with no shirt on and a gun in my hand. According to my roommates I was even sweating. I didn’t point the pistol at anyone, or even rack a round, and my trigger finger was indexed. Despite these details, apparently I looked a bit disconcerting to the two little Asian chicks standing outside my door in their bar-hopping outfits. S and J were busy trying to reassure them that I was really quite harmless, and reassure me that they were harmless as well. I didn’t say anything, but went back in the room and closed the door.

As soon as I calmed down a bit I started laughing. It sounded like the two girls were half ready to leave, and the two guys were trying to calm them down and get them to stay. I could hear the girls downstairs protesting that they never went home with guys before and this was why! “Why didn’t you tell us you had a crazy roommate?! You didn’t see what I saw. All I saw was just this big, shirtless, hairy white guy coming at me!” S and J were trying to explain that I was actually really nice. S said, “He’s fine. He’s actually super religious.”

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t crazy!”

I eventually stopped laughing long enough to go downstairs (with a shirt on this time), introduce myself and apologize for startling them. They invited me to join them line dancing in the living room, but I declined. I’m not sure what S and J were expecting to get out of their company but all they did get was some halfhearted line dancing before the girls left at about 4:30. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I stayed up and did some reading and praying and all the while I was still laughing at the memory of their faces. Maybe that will teach them to go home with strange guys at all hours of the morning.

At any rate, that is why I got very little sleep on top of very little sleep. But at least it was the funniest morning I’ve had in a very long time.