Sleepovers

During sleepovers, I sometimes slept on the queen size bed in my grandfather's room. My grandmother and I slept there, or sometimes my Aunt Norcie and I when she visited from Pennsylvania with Uncle Ernie.

On those occasions my grandfather went to bed, way before we did, in Nancie's bedroom. We usually stayed up to watch the late night talk shows or play our favorite card game, rummy.

The master bedroom it was, and it always seemed like the darkest room in the house, probably because it faced the backyard, away from the street and passing cars. Only dim slanting headlight beams crept along the ceiling from the window that faced the neighbors house. It was the perfect place to fall asleep--if you weren't uneasy about the dark. I would never have slept there alone.

I can still remember how the radio sounded in the darkness. On the nightstand beside the bed, the old clock radio had its knobs tuned to light rock music or sometimes country. Its soft red digital numbers did nothing to abate the darkness. Pop Pop listened to the radio almost every night--I always could hear the music humming through the sound-dulling walls across the hallway. Most sleepovers I slept in my grandmother's room, where we choose to watch television, shows on Nick at Nite like I Love Lucy and The Brady Bunch, until our eyelids drooped low enough to forget to keep them open and we fell asleep.

Sometimes, though not with me, Grandma listened to talk radio when she couldn't sleep. Strange things came on the radio late at night she told me, talks of ghosts and monsters, UFOs and the Cupacabra. I sometimes tried to stay up to hear them, but I could never do it. After a time, all I figured out was the shows had to have come on some time after one thirty in the morning. Coast to Coast AM the show was called, and I thought it was cool that my grandmother listened to it.

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