FREE WORD ASSOCIATION GAME PLAYED ALL NIGHT

I didn't sleep at all last night. You can sing that sentence if you want. I think it is from a song. I seem to remember hearing it sung, usually in a minor complaining tone. I've also heard it said repeatedly in a frustrated voice. Actually I think those who make the statement do snatch a few winks here and there throughout the long night, but it is such a wearisome process it actually seems as if they didn't sleep at all.

I mean it literally. I didn't sleep at all last night. It started with a tennis tournament I was watching. It went on and on and on and I couldn't just go to sleep on the one I'd picked as my winner. Somewhere in my erratic subconscious mind I felt he might lose if I fell asleep.

Back and forth went my eyes from baseline to baseline, making sudden short stops for drop volleys and other unusual cross court angles. Before the game was over I felt twitchings in the muscles that control eye movement. Unusual things began to happen. Aggasi seemed to be on Lendl's side of the court and they both were serving from halfway up the sidelines or near the net.

Why, I realized, I'm going cross-eyed. Mama had always warned me about cross-eyes when I did it just for fun. "Mark my word," she'd say, "Some day they will stay locked-in that way." The only thing that saved that condition, I suppose, was that the show went off the air before the game was over. Cross-eyed or not, I tried to find it on another channel. No luck. Shucks, heck and darn. (deleted) too.

I went out to sit on the porch in the moonlight darkness for a while to let my eyes un-cross. When the two close-together moons became one, I decided all was well again and went to bed. Did I fall asleep? No. I rolled from side to side, top to bottom. No position worked.

I got up and ate some crackers and cheese and took an aspirin. I went outside again to sit in the porch swing to see if the moon was still one. All neighboring houses were tar baby dark. Everyone sleeping soundly, I resented. Not even a dog barked at the gibbous moon. Gibbous moon?. It's that phase between half and full. When that descriptive word came to my mind, it started a chain of thinking much like a free word association test given by psychologists, psychiatrists or just friends playing games. You are given a word and, quickly, you are to respond with a word that given word brings to your mind. And you just keep going with it on and on as long as you like. By a study of your responding chain of words, those who study minds, can tell where your interests lie or where your mind seemed to have gone off onto some weird tangent.

Sometimes I play this "game" myself just for the (deleted) of it. For instance when that word, gibbous, came into my mind, the next word I thought of was beekeeping. I said it aloud, softly, so as not to interrupt the crickets' songs. Why beekeeping? The first time I ever remember encountering the word, gibbous, was in a book by an Ozark woman who is a beekeeper. She has over 800 hives somewhere out near Jack's Fork. The beekeeping word made my next word to be, lawsuit. See any connection? Ever since I read an old book, "The Keeper of the Bees," I've wanted to be a beekeeper, but situated as I am, amongst neighbors who have small children, I could imagine the children turning over a hive, or using one for third base and getting stung maybe 10,000 times, which would lead to a lawsuit.

From lawsuit I went to the name of my lawyer. That prompted a quick run of associations. Fee, jury, verdict, bank account, auction, sold, welfare, Potter's Field. I don't think I have to explain that juxtaposition of words.

In the light of the gibbous moon I looked, with my recovered eyes and fading headache, at my watch. One o'clock! I haven't been awake at one o'clock since I was last in a hospital.

Here went another string of associations. Hospital, incessant blood letting, incessant blood pressure monitoring, snoring roommates snoring, kitchen stove. How did I get off on that association of snoring and kitchen stove?

When a child, living on the farm with no indoor plumbing, sometimes a trip to the out-house became necessary in the middle of the night, an horrendous journey for a child knowing she was living in snake country and not knowing whether they slept at night. And you never knew who or what might be in the privy. Maybe a tarantula or some staying Billy goat, even the dreaded black panther or old Sam Hildebrand, the outlaw, who had been dead for several years, but I didn't know that.

The journey made, and back into the safety of the kitchen, what was I greeted by but the loudest snoring I'd ever heard in my short life. Snoring and whistled breathing interspersed by groans of nightmare pain. It was Grandpa in a downstairs bedroom. I crept behind the kitchen range which had always seemed a place of safety and refuge. Here we warmed the sick kittens, puppies and calves born too soon.

Interrupting my word association I glanced at my watch again although I had to move to a spot where a street light pierced the darkness. The gibbous moon had set. Two o'clock!

I went back inside to lie on the couch, scratching mosquito bites, to think of what I had associated with two o'clock in the morning.

On went the game. Two o'clock, basketball, Ste. Genevieve, muddy roads, detour, back home, explanations, hot cocoa and doughnuts, morning.

I'll let you try to unravel the above associations. By the time I had gone down all the little tributaries of memories, it was morning. Time to get up. I didn't sleep at all that night.

REJOICE!