Monday, July 11, 2016

this from 2005

The Real Reason Why Kids Refuse To Go To Bed.

I am planning a quilt based on the Truth (as I perceived it) behind a common childhood prayer. You know the one I am talking about... I can clearly remember thinking "If I should WHAT before I wake?? Wait just a minute here...". And then, if you forgot to bless someone you cared about at the end, they would die. How could a kid sleep with that kind of anxiety?? 

My solution to dying or being killed in my sleep was to NOT sleep- willingly, that is. I can remember every single detail of the view from my top bunk and when we moved to the house in the suburbs, I would creep down the hallway and hide under the lace-draped dining room table just behind my parent's field of vision and watch TV until after the Tonight Show. Something about Johnny Carson made me feel safe. And he looked a lot like my Dad. 

3 comments:

handstories said...

Ha...I have a similar memory! Four, mom saying the "prayer" & then trying to calm me down as I panicked at the possibility of death…don't remember her ever saying the poem again. Yours is much better!

Dotti said...

My mother, a good Lutheran lady...prone to rote prayers, also recited this one to me. I just never really 'cottoned' on to the dying part...but then mom and I never did see eye to eye. And now I have lived longer without her than with her...in spite of that icky rote prayer and two bouts with serious cancer.

Helen Percy Lystra said...

Lucky me, the line was changed to: "and in the morning when I wake, I ask the Lord what path to take."