Learning to sleep on my back

All of life is learning? Hmmnnnnnnnn!?

Sounds like something I may've read in one of John Dewey's turgid (but enlightening) treatises on education. Or in the writings of some other eminent educator. You get a doctorate and study every day thereafter, and the most you can hope for is to become over-educated-and-under-smart.

Could be I encountered all of life is learning on a poster. Anyway, I hope I did. I've forgotten so much of what I've studied over the past sixty-plus years that I often feel a lifetime of reading and studying has come to naught. Or is swiftly going to naught.

I've always loved learning. I vaguely thought that accumulation of knowledge had something to do with wisdom, as if wisdom were something like the accumulation of moss or mineral accretions on a rock. At least I think that's what I must've thought. Can't quite remember. . . .

I do remember one Sunday, some sixty years ago, sitting in the choir loft of my Methodist Church and having my tic-tac-toe summarily interrupted by the redoubtable Reverend Bailey, who wailed in apparent sorrow:

"Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher. . . . All is vanity!"

I thought I understood what he meant as he blustered wildly through the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes. In fact, I was fairly certain I knew. There I sat, a third of the way through the second service of the day hearing once more that day's Scripture Lesson: "Vanity of vanities!"

It was one of those unseasonably warm, early-spring days when the sanctuary was overheated, when people came to church in their best (and most suffocating) clothing. I had on my scratchiest long-sleeved, starched-white shirt and Sunday tie, and my heaviest woolen socks and winter-trousers beneath my heavy choir robe.

Church attendees in those cruel days always over-dressed for church. Sunday Best, we called it. It was the proud Puritan Ethic of that time that determined we all come to worship in the tradition of suffer the little children to come onto me. . . . At least that was my own vague understanding of the term suffer in the days of my youth, before my mind more fully kicked into high gear. No matter. Grammatical niceties aside, suffer we did.

For me, the entire Scripture Lesson that day had to do with vanity -- a term I correlated with over-dressing for church. So I guess I missed the preacher's point.

Sadly, I also missed the woeful point of the equally woeful 16th verse of first Chapter which implies that striving after wisdom is but striving after wind. True. But how could I know at age 13 that at age 75 so much wind would eventually come to me naturally. No study or work necessary, thank-you-very-much. Just sit down and eatcher veggies.

But I digress.

What I wanted to do is move quickly from

"All of life is learning,"
through "I'm forgetting
everything I've studied,"
to Ecclesiastes 12:

"Of making many books there is no end,
and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

Thus does old age recognize at last the truth lost on the mind of a 13-year-old choir boy.

So What? So what if I forget? I still like to learn stuff.


Currently I'm trying to learn, trying to master sleeping on my back. Old habits die hard. Nancy and I nearly always slept on our sides facing each other, foreheads and noses nested neatly together on the same pillow, our arms and legs gently tangled, drawing each other close. We'd fall quickly asleep together in this mirrored posture, never moving until awakened by the sun.

For nearly four decades of sleeping bliss, my left shoulder never complained. Not a peep of complaint. But just lately: Holy Cow! Old lefty screams at me. And I'm reluctant to mess with it.

I mean, mess with it by going to my orthopedic surgeon-buddy who replaced my knee. He'll surely wanna perform one of his miraculous shoulder-rebuilding operations. There I'll be laboring through a lengthy post-operative recovery period, tryna figure out how to get dressed, clean house, grocery-shop, and myriad other physical difficulties a solitary person would have to struggle through alone.

Hasta be a simpler solution.

I'd shift sides of the bed -- sleep on my right shoulder. But I'm not certain that shoulder might not begin to complain. No need to antagonize my aging joints. Whatever's still working fairly well, I'd like to leave alone.

Surely I can learn to sleep on my back. In fact, in the good-old days, whenever I wiggled lose and rolled over onto my back, Nancy would wiggle forward and nest her head into the crook of my shoulder and underarm, her left arm warmly clutching my chest, her right forearm thrust up between us where I could easily grasp her hand. This easy posture-change was so practiced and fluid, it apparently took place while we slept.

So I know I can sleep on my back. Could be I could do a lot of things quite easily -- with Nancy nestled safely in my arms. Could be her absence is the problem I can't seem to solve.

A simpler explanation might be that the onset of aging complicates much of what was once easily accomplished. Occham's Razor: Other things being equal, the easiest answer is probably the best. I'm just old. My body has gotten irritable and cranky.

Let's hope I don't permit my mind to take the same route.

In fact, my mind insists: Stop complaining! Learn to sleep on your back!


I've never been one to argue, with my own mind or with anybody else's. But now and then lately it has occurred to me that I may be working on the wrong problem.

Could be I should be doing what Nancy asked me to do during our final conversation before she died. Could be I should still be trying to find a comely woman I can love who loves me.

I've forgotten lately a lot of things I've learned in a lifetime of study. But I haven't forgotten what women have taught me over the past two years:

all difficulties considered,
I'm certain it'll be
a whole lot easier
learning to sleep on my back.