Six-Thirty and Other Lies

Last night, I made one of the silliest mistakes of my life.

I went to bed at five o’clock in the evening. Now, a fellow who goes to bed at that hour is either eight years old, ninety-eight years old, or carrying the sort of exhaustion that can flatten a horse.

I was operating under the third condition. The moment my head touched the pillow, consciousness packed its belongings, left no forwarding address, and abandoned me entirely.

I slept the sleep of the innocent. It was deep, peaceful, and uninterrupted.

No dreams. No tossing. No turning.

Just the kind of rest that makes a man wonder whether he accidentally slipped into a medically induced coma. Then disaster struck.

I rolled over, opened one eye, and looked toward the clock. Before I even focused on the numbers, I noticed daylight leaking around the curtains.

My heart stopped. The clock read 6:30.

Well, that was enough evidence for my sleepy brain. It immediately concluded that I had overslept for work.

There was no room for facts, investigation, or common sense. The prosecution had rested its case.

I launched myself out of bed with a speed not seen since the last free buffet in Nevada. I staggered toward the bathroom while simultaneously trying to calculate how much trouble I was in.

As I stumbled down the hall, another alarming thought struck me. “What happened to Mary?”

Now there was a mystery. Mary usually notices when I oversleep.

She has a remarkable talent for detecting such things. If I am five minutes late, she appears like a government auditor. Yet this morning, she had apparently allowed me to slumber right into unemployment.

I glanced toward her side of the room. The bed was unslept in.

At that point, my panic upgraded itself from a misdemeanor to a felony. I abandoned the bathroom entirely.

There are moments when a man’s priorities change. Finding Mary suddenly outranked every other item on the agenda.

I began searching for my cell phone so I could call her. The hunt lasted only a few seconds, though it felt like a chapter from an adventure novel.

At last, I found it, grabbed it, and turned it over. There, glowing cheerfully on the screen, was the answer to every mystery in military time.

Six-thirty in the evening. Sunday evening.

I had not overslept for work. I had not missed anything.

Mary had not vanished, civilization remained intact, and the Republic was safe.

For several moments, I stood there in silence, contemplating the astonishing ability of the human mind to manufacture catastrophe from absolutely nothing. Give a man one glimpse of daylight and a clock, and he can create a crisis worthy of a congressional hearing.

Having solved the case, I returned to bed. The bathroom could wait, work could wait, and reality itself could wait.

I pulled the blanket over my head and resumed my interrupted career as a professional sleeper, wiser than before and slightly embarrassed. Then again, embarrassment is a small price to pay for discovering that your disaster is actually nine hours away.