2 AM Musings

One should never fall asleep around suppertime and wake up after 9 PM.  It really wrecks going to bed at a decent hour.

And to make it worse, strange thoughts float around in one's head at 2 AM.  Well, to be perfectly honest, strange thoughts aren't really all that unusual for me, but I digress.

I was wondering, at 2 AM, why my parent's generation was so terribly worried about what people would think.  Like the time when my Mother's doctor prescribed a shot of brandy at night to help her sleep.  Mother made Dad get the brandy from the druggist rather than the liquor store, even though he paid twice the price at the drug store for brandy in a prescription bottle, because she was afraid of what people would say if they saw him coming out of the liquor store.

As a kid, I went through a stage where I wore mostly jeans and my Dad's old flannel shirts.  I lived in the country.  I played in the woods.  I grubbed around in the garden.  I did yard work.  I sat up in apple trees and read books.  I liked jeans and old comfy flannel shirts.  But Mother was always after me to change clothes because what would people say if we got company and they saw me dressed like that.

My 4-H softball team practiced on Sunday afternoons.  I loved playing softball.  I was a pretty fair shortstop.  But Mother was worried about what people would say if they knew that I was playing ball on Sunday, which was a day of rest.

I always wondered who "They" were.  Who were these people who were just waiting for my family to do something out of the ordinary so they could say whatever it was that they were going to say.  I probably, in retrospect, shouldn't have posed this question to Mom, for, as I recall, it got me a week of living in my bedroom and a month of Wednesday night Prayer Meeting at the church, no doubt to pray for the state of my rebellious soul.  I think that having a daughter who was, at that time, a bit of a free spirit, must have been a trial for her.

Odd, the things one remembers at 2 AM.