Sigourney Weaver's Got Nothin' On Us

I remember spending the night at my grandparents' house, where I woke up, with a start, in the night to what sounded like a freight train running through the center of the house. They lived out in the plains of Illinois in the middle of a cornfield,  no train tracks for miles. My folks were in one bedroom, my grandparents in another. My sister and I were wedged like sardines in the middle room, our little brother camped out on the floor. The grand wall-shaking noise that was going on was from four humans snoring all at the same time. It was surreal. Ungodly. Like to have scared me to death. 

Fast forward fifty years and I find myself in an old Victorian house with this handsome beastie who snores with sounds reminiscent of an old pipe organ: whistles and toots and the occasional bass thrum.  Come to find out I have a symphony of my own going on across the sheets. When Papa took to falling asleep every time he sat down, whether it be at church or on a park bench, I conspired to get him to a sleep study. He denied it to the doctor, but Doc believed me and now we're both signed up. We had to go to a silly class, drive an hour there and back, and sit while they played a Youtube video about how to hook up a contraption while Ken sleeps, to figure out if he's worthy of a CPAP machine. That's a thing that blows cold air down your throat while you're snoozing. It looks like the creature in those movies that attached to people's faces and implanted aliens in their bellies. You're supposed to feel good about something that covers your nose and mouth and forces oxygen into your body, while you think about nightmares you had from that movie. They said I'm special and have to do my sleep study in a lab. Cover me with monitors and wires, climb into a strange bed and have people watch me sleep all night. I'm relaxed now, for sure.

I had to text my good friend Grace. She's been my friend for about fourty years, met and bonded in college. I trust her when she says that her CPAP machine saved her life. She's the one who persuaded me to do this thing. After I messaged her yesterday, she said she'd send pictures of herself when she got strapped in. I heard my phone ping late in the day and opened up a scary image of her with that torture chamber hitched on to her beautiful European face. I don't know if Ken is gonna be ready for all this, but I imagine he'll get used to it. My only concern is that once we get our machines and start using them every night, we might not hear an intruder with all that noise rushing around our heads. On the other hand, maybe they'd run away, terror-stricken, after seeing a couple of middle-aged aliens sit up in bed. Wish us luck.