Sleepless In Mobile Post #6

          As I said in my last post, after eight weeks of hell, the long trip moving from Upstate NY to Southern Alabama, and now that I would not have to face another cold, snowy winter, sleep would envelop me just as a newborn swathed in soft blankets!  I couldn't have been more wrong! That first night, I was mesmerized by a world I had never seen before, the live oaks that tunneled the streets and landscaping that resembles a tropical garden. As I lay down, exhausted, I began to wonder what my new world would look like during the day! It reminded me of being a teenager and going to Disney World.  I never slept the night before, as I laid awake in wonder of what the next day would bring.

          The same took place this first night in Mobile.  I lay awake imagining what my new world would look like. I listened to sounds I had never heard before and was amazed that the birds were singing all night long! In New York, birds sing in the morning. In Mobile, a place where every day is a celebration, the birds must think so too because they happily sing and holler to each other all night long. I tried to imagine what they might be saying and wondered if they had accents. “Hey, Angelo! Come over heah and see Mario’s new nest!” Or perhaps it was more like, “Whaa, Ya’ll come back naow! Hayer?” Or how about, “Cowraline? You close that doah when you leave for Naw’lins now! Ya heah?” I thought about another friend I had met that night named ‘Spooky’.

          Spooky is a black cat that was sitting in the driveway in the photo of the house on Craigslist. Before moving here, I jokingly asked the owner, “Does that black cat come with the house?” He informed me that, 'indeed he does', as the previous owner tried to take him but the cat just came back. Although I’m not an indoor cat person – (they break all your Majolica) I certainly did not mind him hanging on my porch. And hanging he was, as though he too, was expecting us and anxiously awaiting our arrival. He proudly greeted us and when I bent down to pet him, he put his hands on my face, pulled mine to his to ‘rub faces’ a trademark I had never seen until I met Spooky. That night I wondered if he would be there in the morning waiting for me, along with the Live Oaks. I wondered a lot of things that night, and many nights after.

          For the next two months, literally I lived on about three hours of sleep per night. Each was like ‘the night before Disney’, as I eagerly waited for morning to see my new world and have coffee on the porch with Spooky and the birds, who sang me lullabies through the night. At times, I would go out on the porch in the night for no other reason than to make sure I was still in the south, that I could still smell the sweet fragrance that permeates the air. For the first time in my life, I could lay awake, not worrying about the impending gloom, doom, and cold that would inevitably come our way; that which often rendered me a prisoner in my efforts to avoid the extreme cold.  Now I lay awake and wondered, ‘What will winter be like with no snow? Is this beauty really not going to go away?’ Although a NY Fall is beautiful in the prime of it’s fullest glory, to me it was a symbol of what was to come, barren trees that looked like dead skeletons, gray skies and cold damp weather that would claim five months a year out of my life, totaling nearly 20 years of wishing for warm weather and blue skies! These were the things that kept me awake, night after night for well over two months!

          Another thing that I noticed, on one of those ‘pre-Disney’ nights, were the trains. I had never heard so many in my whole life, especially in the middle of the night! The difference between trains here and those in NY is the muffled sound they make here – as though a ghost train from the long ago past manages to sound it’s horn through a time-passage to now.  I wondered why the difference and thought that perhaps the humidity muffled the sound.  Then the articles came out in the Press about the noise level of the trains downtown (only a mile away) in the midnight hours and how this disturbed the visitors of the convention center hotel where the tracks actually ran under the building. On those nights, I wondered; if it had been fifty years earlier, would I have been committed to a psychiatric institution? I’d lay there in bed and laugh my butt off thinking about our guests to Mobile, being jarred awake nearly every half hour by the trains that ran right beneath them! I bet the horns didn’t sound so muffled to them! “Hee hee hee!” I knew that if anyone saw me, alone in the dark, laughing hysterically, they’d surely think I had stepped off the deep end.

           The sleep deprivation had no affect on me. I simply was not tired – ever! There was something here that grounded me in a way I had never been before; Spooky – with his cigarette and whiskey sounding voice - who I’m still not convinced is not a reincarnate of a previous owner of this house, the birds that still include me in their all-night parties, the neighbors who so graciously made us feel welcome, the trees that envelop the streets and make me feel safe and secure, and even the far away sounds of the train horns that now lull me to sleep. They all gave me their very own orientation to the Deep South, each in their own version. 

Many times on those nights, I thought back to an old childhood book, “Go Dog Go!” On one page, there are about ten dogs sleeping soundly in a large bed, all but one. His eyes are wide open! As a child, I wondered if he was lonely lying there awake all by himself. ‘Was he scared? Or perhaps worried?’ That thought haunted me through much of my childhood whenever I looked at that book. But that first night and many nights after, I realized, that dog must have moved to Mobile too! Like me, he was excited about what the morning would bring.