On Tuesday, May 12, 1987, I couldn’t sleep. As usual, I was a bit petrified of navigating through the following day with few hours of shuteye, a ridiculous habit that began sometime when I was in second grade – my subconscious yielding to unending calculations of minutes and hours and seconds and some bizarre fear I’d become a zombie tomorrow.
My acute insomnia continues to this day, but often instead of a simple fear of impending exhaustion, it’s related to anxieties about age, friends, family and the Cubs. But that night it was bad, especially for a kid.
Nine years old and in a hotel room in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, in 1987, I couldn’t drop off. I stared at the ceiling. I turned to one side. Then, to the other. My teddy bear – named “Bounce” out of either panic or stupid exuberance – was no comfort, he simply sat next to me, perched on pillow, eyes staring blankly at the dark TV. Street lamps flickered under the inn room curtains, and I surely wasn’t scared, even though mid-1980s Cleveland wasn’t exactly paradise.
I sat up and sniffled, apparently so taken aback by insomnia I bordered on tears. From across the hotel room my grandmother, also awake, asked me what was wrong. Of course I couldn’t sleep; of course I was worried about missing even a moment of life on the road; traveling across the country with my grandparents and seeing hundreds of places for the first time.
En route from haughty Clear Lake, Iowa, to supremely haughty Ridgefield, Connecticut, our journey traversed through burgs small and large, stopovers in parks and Holiday Inns and Bob Evans restaurants and South Bend and Joliet and Canton, Ohio, and Erie, Pa. and Syracuse and Mystic, Conn. and Springfield, Mass. and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Hartford and Indianapolis and more. For a kid who’d only been to Minneapolis or Des Moines exclusively, the trip bordered on the time of my young life.
Now here it was, nearly two in the morning, and I laid awake. Embarrassed and scared, now I was mortified I woke my grandparents up; I’d probably ruin their trip as well.
But my grandmother happily rose and offered to play cards, she hadn’t been sleeping, either. So we did. She played everything; ran a weekly bridge game and had taught me pinochle once upon a time and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she dealt me five-card poker. Instead, we settled on Crazy Eights and Blackjack, sitting round the Holiday Inn table, Bounce securely watching from his perch on the bed; my grandfather sleeping far away.
I’m not sure how many games I won or how many times I earned 21 or anything like that. I could barely shuffle the cards, let alone flip them downward in a bridge like Grandma did. That vacation was somewhat of a turning point in my own life – if not personally significant, then deeply illuminating. It cemented my love of travel and road trips and new places; excitement and enthusiasm I carry to this day (Yes, even during tedious work-related jaunts to Liberal, Kansas or Pueblo, Colo.). I visited New York City for the first time on that trip, and also visited Syracuse University – the first testament to my bewildering fandom. I still love New York, still somewhat regret I only lived in its shadow for a year. We swung through the football and basketball Halls of Fame and I’ll never forget those either.
But I’ll certainly always remember life on the road with my grandparents. My grandfather yearning to travel on a Harley instead of his Crown Victoria, my grandmother letting me stay up late and play cards. Like me, she also had insomnia – or at least an inability to sleep as soundly as one should. Like me, she was competitive, whether it was cards or tennis or sports, and she reveled in watching monumental sports events (She missed yesterday’s Nadal-Federer match, which she would have loved) or the mundane day-to-day sports grind. She followed the Minnesota Twins night in and night out, and inside my family no one is as vociferous a baseball fan as me, or as devoted to each nightly or daily game, except for Grandma.
Of course she was more than just sports or baseball or trips or playing cards or staying up late; she simply enjoyed those pursuits as much as she enjoyed everything. She consumed books and TV and news and films and sports with a respectful passion, vigor and intelligence refreshing in an era of instant history and a constant media cycle. (Including, but not limited to, snarky little blogs serving as creative outlets for struggling first-time authors.) I’d like to think I’m as much a dabbler, an intellectual, a realist and as well-read as she – but if (probably) not, at least I can always aspire. I’d also like to think my talent for writing and drawing and design owes her a debt – ridiculous Mike Fontenot puns notwithstanding, of course.
But I know that Tuesday night in Cleveland, more than 20 years ago, I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep. I was off, to see the world, with no better guide than my grandmother, even as she produced a string of endless eights to beat me at cards over and over. I’m now 30 years old, my first completed novel under my belt, this blog replacing my pencil drawings and hastily-stapled comic books as my creative outlet; my zest for the Cubs at fatalist levels largely unchanged from 1987. And still, in my life, there’s no better guide than she.
On Saturday morning, July 5, my grandmother died at 92. Monday would have been her 93rd birthday.