David Kirby
Little Italian Boy in Local Restaurant Sets Good Example for Area Residents
He takes everything out of his mother's purse,
and then he goes after every purse in the restaurant.
In five minutes, the courtyard is covered with cell phones,
tampons, wadded-up tissues, gum, candy, packs
of cigarettes, lighters, car keys. In ten minutes, every woman
in the restaurant is holding her purse in her lap.
That morning, I’d been reading about “segmented
sleep,” which is what scientists call the pattern
whereby you go to sleep a couple of hours after dusk
and wake in the middle of the night for an hour or two
and sleep until you wake again around dawn, a practice
responsible today for billions of dollars in annual sales
of sleep aids but which was normal for most people
for millennia and is probably healthier and possibly
more cost-efficient than the standard midnight-to-eight
sleep pattern most of us are used to, which many of us
aren’t. One historian unearthed more than 500 references
to segmented sleep in diaries, court records, medical books,
and literary works, from The Odyssey to an account
of tribal life in modern-day Nigeria, noting, “It's not
just the number of references—it is the way they refer
to it, as if it were common knowledge,” and now
the little boy is looking up into my face and saying,
“Nonno?” by which I’m guessing he is Italian and to which
I reply, yes, I’m a grandpa but not your grandpa,
which he may or may not have understood
because he turns before I have finished my sentence
and runs back to his father, who is talking to another man,
and is now shooting his father’s zipper up and down
and as the two men smile and nod at one another
and discuss sports or the stock market or food
or whatever it is that two men might discuss
on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. When people woke
out of first sleep, they were often quite active:
they prayed, smoked tobacco, had sex, visited
their neighbors if they saw a light on in their house
or burglarized them if the house was dark, then
returned home and went back to sleep till morning.
Writers wrote, scholars read, merchants reviewed
their inventories, farmers planned the next sowing
or harvest. What productivity! What achievement!
What potential is here unleashed, for good or ill!
Dark Ages, my eye. They may not have had penicillin
or voting rights in those days, but they knew how
to get things done: a 16th-century doctor's manual
advised couples that the best time to conceive
was not at the end of a long day's labor but "after
the first sleep,” when "they have more enjoyment"
and "do it better.” A century later, references to first
and second sleep began to disappear, and by the 1920s,
the idea had receded entirely from our consciousness,
thanks to improvements in both street and domestic lighting
and a surge in coffee houses. Little fellow, you really
know how to manage your time. You are getting
things done: unimportant things, true, or things
important only to you, but that’ll change.
Congratulations, you first- and second-sleepers!
You invented our world—I can’t prove that,
but you must have, because your world preceded ours.
At least you didn’t do anything that might have
kept us from being exactly where we are right now,
looking back at you with pride and envy
and asking ourselves what we might do to best
honor your legacy. I, for one, vow to wake cheerfully
in the middle of the night, which is an easy oath
to take because I usually do anyway, though not
always cheerfully, though I vow to do a better job
in the future, meaning I’ll not stare at the ceiling
and think how much I hate my enemies and wish
that they’d slip and fall as they walk across a stage
to receive an award that should have gone to me
or drink too much and throw up in the lap
of their university’s president at a banquet
at which he or she is to receive an award that
would have gone to me had I been employed
by that institution. No, no: from this moment forward,
I will embrace only wholesome activities,
ones that harm no one and please all, starting
with myself, and in this will I follow the example
of the little boy who is pleasing himself first
and foremost at the moment by raising
and lowering every umbrella in the courtyard
and, by doing so, bringing joy to those of us who are
watching him, with the exception of his mom, to whom
I lean over and say, “Your son’s going to be an engineer,”
and in response to which confident assertion she sighs
and says, "You're not the first to say that."
In fact, I am going to start my new life right now
because the sun is sinking and I want to be home
in time to move the laundry from the washer
to the dryer and feed my kitty and read a little
and slide between the sheets and read a little
more as the light in the room becomes faint
and fainter still and then close my eyes
and dream of the innumerable good deeds I will
perform when I wake in the middle of the night
and then again when the sun appears, the first
of which I’ll perform right now as I stop on my way out
at the table where the mother sits with a faraway
look in her eyes and say, “Your son’s a genius.”
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” Kirby has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”
Banner Art:
Still Life with Birds and Fruit, Giovanna Garzoni, c. 1650
