It’s the opposite of counting sheep 

I don’t know about you, but there are great universal mysteries that keep me up at night. It can be baffling for sure. And the loss of sleep can wreak havoc on your charming disposition as the sun welcomes the following day.

This phenomenon didn’t start with old age and acid reflux. 

I blame it on Leon. He grew up out in leftfield. We’d be at supper, discussing the Easter hats that Mrs. Ethel Mitchum and Aline Brashear wore to church. You remember these, they were wide brimmed and had wild flowers and bird nests growing in them. We’d move on to hog prices or the St. Louis Cardinals’ chances in the upcoming baseball season. Dad would be complaining about gas prices rising to 23 cents a gallon….

Just normal stuff. Another regular evening. Right in the middle of the mundane family meal, Leon would insert, “Do y’all ever wonder which one of those Iroquois Indians had the guts to first cut his hair in that mohawk style?”

Well, you can just imagine the absolute cold stone silence! Mom, who always kept the conversation flowing, couldn’t flow through that.

And before any of us could recover, he added, “Do you reckon they shaved the sides of their heads, or plucked out each individual hair?”

People, I didn’t hardly sleep for a week and a half. I read “The Deerslayer” and “The Last of the Mohicans” hoping to catch a clue. 

Maybe that was the beginning….

Or it might have gone back to the second grade. Miss Booth read us that story about Yankee Doodle. Remember him? He “went to town riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.” I couldn’t sleep trying to figure out if he was calling the town macaroni. Or was he referring to his cap? Or the pony? Maybe he was naming the feather….

Hostess Cupcakes cost me some snoozing time, back then, and later in life. I would lay awake and wonder how they got the cream filling right in the middle of the chocolate part. And I wasn’t sure if the squiggly lines across the top were done by a machine or hand “squeezed on” by men and women wearing hairnets.

Sadly, recently I’ve pondered, when I should have been sleeping, as to why the reproduction Hostess Cupcakes today don’t taste half as good as they did in 1955.

I can’t remember if it was Miss Mary Ann in the sixth grade or Coach Givens in junior high science that first introduced me to the quandary of the tree falling in the woods. If no one was around to hear it, would it make any noise? I’ve lost sleep on that one, and I still don’t know the correct answer.

I’ve never not heard a tree falling in the woods. But if nobody was there….? 

Speaking of junior high, it was along about that time that I stared wide awake at the ceiling, wondering why none of the pretty girls ever talked to me. But all of the less than pretty ones were “up close and personal,” telling me way more than I wanted to hear.

Leon was the first to tell me that a cat, no matter how close to the ground you drop it, always lands on its feet. I near ’bout wore Mittens out, holding her upside down at different heights off the floor, and dropping her. Danged if she didn’t land on her feet every time. She was the quickest thing I’ve ever seen getting herself right-side-up.

I still lay away over this deal to this day, wondering if every cat in the world is as fast and balanced as Mittens.

When I was a boy, Pluto was a planet. No one questioned that. I slept like a baby. In our high school science class, we had an oversized schematic showing how all nine planets revolved around the sun. Pluto was the farthest out but it was DEFINITELY on the chart!

I woke up one morning to headlines screaming that Pluto was not a planet. There is somebody messing with the intergalactic cosmos here. Mr. Berry would not have hung up a chart that was lying to us.

It is an international conspiracy! I know they’re wrong, but I can’t sleep anyway. I’m searching Einstein’s notes with every spare moment of my life. I am watching old Star Wars movies. Captain Kirk would know the truth….

Listen, I’m not the only Colbert boy who has laid awake deep into the night. I got a call a few years ago. It was way past midnight. I was peacefully asleep, dreaming I was playing the 13th hole at the Augusta National Golf Course.

I jumped out of bed, banging a toe on the nearby dresser. I hopped on one foot down the hall to the phone, and answered with a sleepy, and a bit worried, “Hello.”

“Hey,” Leon, of course, “Have you ever wondered what happened to all the people who tested Preparation A though G.”

Respectfully,

Kes