Will this be the year that I reach my quirky goal?
As the longest day of the year approaches, I think it could be possible.
Every day the sun goes down later and later. And every year I go to bed earlier and earlier.
Surely someday the two will meet, I think, and I will manage the feat:
I will go to bed while it’s still light out.
I’m pretty close already. Come 9 o’clock, I’m casting longing glances upstairs. The night may be young for the young, but I’m ready for my jammies and bedtime story.
It didn’t used to be so. Once upon a time, I worked nights and closed 4 a.m. bars. In college, my school newspaper friends and I sometimes stayed up all night putting out the paper.
I can barely recall that person. My husband and I recently went to a 7:30 p.m. movie and congratulated ourselves for staying out late. The last time I was up all night was when I accidentally took cough medicine labeled “nondrowsy.”
Parenthood put the first nails into my late nights’ coffin. Exhaustion made it hard to stay up much longer than my children did.
And I never really made it back to my night-owl ways. By the time my daughters were finishing high school they were occasionally lapping me, coming home when I was waking up.
Now they are out of the house. But inside it, I am nodding off in front of the TV at 8.
Plenty of other grown-ups also are brushing and flossing early. When I posted on Facebook my lament about my 9 p.m. bedtime, company poured in.
That would be me, sometimes even 8:30 p.m. So sad!!!.
I am in pjs and incoherent after 9:00 p.m.
I start fading at 9:15 every night.
9:30 is a splurge.
I consider it a late night when I can watch the 9 o’clock news without falling asleep!
I do it only to be a good example to my elementary school age boys. Only!
I’d go to bed at 9 every night if I could!
I am putting MY jammies on at 7…OY!
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I can’t seem to keep my eyes open beyond 9pm. Does this qualify as “age-related”?
It does. We are all operating on a predictable age-related schedule.
“As we get older, the biological clock in the brain begins to run a little faster,” said Dr. Phyllis Zee, associate director of Northwestern University’s Center for Sleep & Circadian Biology. “Your 24-hour day is a little bit shorter. So older people tend to wake up a little earlier, and they will also get sleepy earlier.
“It’s really like the opposite of a teenager’s, whose clock runs a little slower and can’t get to sleep until 2 in the morning.”
And once we start getting up earlier — and most people do in time because as we age we need less sleep — exposure to light early in the day resets our internal clocks earlier, reinforcing the “early to bed and early to rise” routine.
I might have scoffed once, if not with the wit of Carl Sandburg: “Early to bed and early to rise,” he wrote in 1928, “and you never meet any prominent people.”
But I bet plenty of prominent people are putting on their fluffy bunny slippers a couple of hours after dinner, too.
As it turns out, I like living on AARP Central Time. I love mornings, with their glowing dawns and fresh-smelling promise. I’m delighted to get into bed at 9 p.m. with a good book and the prospect of a good night’s sleep.
And I’ve got a challenge going on.
I remember the last time I went to bed while it was still light out, I raged to my parents about the unfairness. It wasn’t even night yet! My room wasn’t dark! Other kids were still out playing! A last hour of a summer day, wasted!
But it would be different this time.
How intriguing it would be to go to bed when it wasn’t even night yet; how sweet to doze off to the sounds of kids playing.
The last of the day wouldn’t be wasted; a whole summer day would be ahead, to be greeted with the freshness of a long, languid sleep — because even though Zee says marathon sleeps are the realm of teenagers, I think I can still manage a good chunk of shut-eye.
On June 23, and for seven nights after that, the sun in Chicago sets at the latest time of the year — 8:30 p.m.
Game on.