Early morning and what is and isn't in my head

Yesterday and it is  2:38 in the morning. Sounds like a line from a country song, who knows if it's  a good one. Two days in a row, I'm awake and thoughts are running  like a clear, mountain stream. Thank God.


I am grateful when the lunar lunacies spend the night away from home and when the things that talk to me in the middle of the night do so quietly and calmly. Quiet and calm beats the hell out of unruly talking children thoughts who get up in my head, shout, laugh and poke at me, who get scared and scream at me. Spending  early morning with thoughts that run on quiet power and speak to me like I have good sense,  are easy. Early morning with screaming unruly children thoughts is when a five minute conversation lasts 10,000 years and  being run over by a Mack truck would be a kinder thing.


I get up and write my emos. For whatever reason, the last two weeks all the memos have been emos. That is what keeps popping out of my mouth, "I'll write you an emo." I need to remember to look emo up---maybe there is a deeper meaning to writing emos than writing memos, the thought at least entertains me, more than the actual emos do. I write the emos and send a pile of them off and climb back into bed. It is 3:38.


I can't find a place for my legs because Gratefulest Dog has decided my absence means he can stretch out horizontally and he has left me an inch. I move my legs. He ends up off the bed and on the floor. Immediately his Dad wakes up.


"Why are you shoving the dog off the bed?"
"I didn't. I moved my legs and off he went."


"WHY are you shoving the dog off the bed?"
I didn't, I swear I moved my legs and he went off."


"Right."
Gratefulest is back on the bed by this time, half-horizontal and half-vertical. We are awake.


He tells me it is all my doing that the dog is on the bed to begin with. I refuse to own that one. I remember when he came and he slept on the sunroom floor and stared in the windows at us, and we stared back. He had his bed and we had ours. We were not so unified at 3:38 in the morning.


"Every time I went out of town, he slept with you. You started it."
"That's different."


It doesn't seem to be a productive conversation but it makes us both laugh. We start talking about an art project in Georgia, Perceptual Control Theory, the emos, the printer, the offices, the studio, retrofitting plumbing. We start talking about something else, he says, "You remember?" As usual, I don't. I used to always remember.


 I tell him, "You know I don't know what is in my head anymore but I sure as hell know what isn't." Country song 2.


 It is a long conversation ---probably the longest one we've had in weeks. It is real and it is us and it is funny. Thank God. The gifts 3:38 and a dog flying in the morning can bring.


There is a loud, low noise that hums above us and hangs out. "What the hell is that?" It lasts about a minute. Both of us are too quiet and run through our heads anything it could have been. It comes back and hangs and lingers again. It shakes us up and we can't come up with a single, "good" explanation.


Sweetheart gets up. Time for early coffee and pondering the fact that he wishes a UFO would come and visit. He has wished it for a long, long time. I lie in bed and think how it would be to run downstairs and tell Mama. To tell her that the world she believes has gone crazy now has  a UFO and real ETs in it. When I tell her later in the day, she laughs. And then she ponders what that means.


It is almost the New Year, and tomorrow night I will probably be wide awake again in the middle of the night, listening for Sweetheart's UFO. I will be grateful if the thoughts are quietly conversing and not the unruly children screaming, it would be a good way to have a new beginning. I will lie there and  feel Gratefulest up against my legs and maybe if I'm lucky, hear Sweetheart laugh in his sleep and I will not so much care what is or isn't in my head.