I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake. Not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups sold in bookstores, like, “Hope is the thing with feathers” or the one Thoreau said about confidently pursuing your dreams, which now I forget the rest of. 

Sleep is the great blessing of retirement, especially for someone like me – or is it “someone like myself”? I used to know this – someone who in his working years (so-called, in my case, because my work was talking and telling stories, no heavy lifting involved) – and I was crisscrossing time zones and going from EST to PST. I’d be awake at 1 and 2 with a plane to catch at 7 so I could make it to a benefit in New York for Rich People Who Wish To Help Poor People Without Having To Be In Physical Contact With Them and I couldn’t sleep on planes because of a fear of dying in a plane crash and, having been brought up evangelical, I wanted to be awake for my death so I could quickly repent for any unforgiven sins and make sure I’d go to heaven and meet Grandma and Grandpa and not go to hell and spend eternity with Stalin and Hitler. 

I couldn’t tell anybody about my sleep disorder because my radio show was famous for its soporific benefits. I did a 15-minute monologue in the middle that had an amazing calming effect on people. Millions of CDs of the monologues were sold to people who never actually heard them and I won several Grammy Awards, though the judges could not later recall what the monologues were about. I did the show in a theatre and we closed off the balcony for fear someone might sleepwalk and fall over the railing, and often the entire audience got caught up in slow rhythmic breathing, every eye closed. It was like a religious experience. My best monologue was a reminiscence of a drive across North Dakota, Dad at the wheel, we six kids in back, nobody talking, all of us watching for the mountains Mother said were just ahead. My blissful recollection of the drive had a powerful effect, so much so that I gave the monologue every Saturday for three months in a row and nobody noticed, not even the stagehands or the sound engineer. It is still used in sleep clinics around the country. I donate the royalties to the Apnea Foundation. 

In retirement, as I say, my nocturnal life has blossomed into extensive dreams, pastoral epics in which I am a great sailor, an artist, a standup comic, a race car driver, a ballet dancer – dreams of competence and authority – and the other night (I am now getting back to what I started to say in the first paragraph) I dreamed that I had written a perfect limerick and in my dream I was afraid that if I fell asleep I’d forget it, but in my dream I was arguing with myself and thinking, “You’re awake” and the conflict, knowing that my sleep self was wrong, that I was sleeping, woke me up, and I sat down and wrote the limerick, about the famous podcaster Phoebe Judge, host of Criminal, which everyone except me (I?) has heard, but I refuse to hear podcasts, because earbuds look funny on me, and the challenge was to not use the rhyme ‘heebie-jeebie’. 

A girl who loves radio, Phoebe,

Has AM and FM and CB,

And plays them proudly,

Constantly, loudly,

At 370 dB,

And when she was caught

She fired a shot

At the cops with her personal BB,

And when she turned deaf

She shouted the F-

Word that’s not found in Mister White, E.B. 

It is a perfect limerick, not that this is the solution to our national dilemmas, but the limerick is one enterprise in which perfection is possible and that is why I keep returning to it. I look back at my life and I see a series of sinking ships and gunshot wounds in my feet, but A girl who loves radio, Phoebe is right up there with the five or six perfect ones I’ve written. This column is not perfect. It strikes me as somewhat disorganised and scattered but, as I say so often, it is what it is. Someday I’ll write about that. 

REPOSTING THIS POEM FROM 8.9.21 (it was published with improper formatting)

FIRST READER 

Bryn Mawr girl in the plaid skirt and the sweater set

Working at The New Yorker in the summer of ’69

Reading unsolicited stories, smoking a cigarette,

Thank you, darling, for choosing mine. 

You sent it upstairs with your blessing, a green slip,

Telling the editor to read it and he read it.

And thanks to your kindness I launched a small ship

And went off in the direction I still am headed. 

Years have passed since you looked my way and smiled

And I have no idea where you went, my sweet.

I don’t know your name who drew me from the pile,

But I remember you, my angel of West 43rd Street. 

       I have done some good work. Lord knows I have tried,

       But I tell you, the importance of angels cannot be denied.

Originally published by garrisonkeillor.com and reprinted here with permission.