Column: Sleeping in

I don’t think I was bouncing out of bed before I absolutely had to. That changed after I joined the Navy Officer Candidate School at Newport, R.I., in 1968 as my way to avoid being drafted by the Army and winding up wading through some rice paddy in Vietnam.

As I recall, you had to hit the deck at 0600 hours for inspection. I quickly realized I could avoid inspection by joining the OCS band after renting a saxophone at an off-base music store. We played “Anchors Aweigh” every morning and then went about classroom work and marching drills.

Each class had to present a concert at the end of a four-month term. I nailed the solo segment of “Dreamsville” in a Henry Mancini medley to much applause.

Then, after graduation, I went to my assigned destroyer where sleep patterns were nonexistent due to rotating watch schedules that had you up, and asleep, at all hours of the day and night.

After the Navy, I wound up as a ski bum in Vermont where my rambunctious life-style definitely did not encourage early rising in the morning. That all changed after I got a job as a newspaper reporter in Montpelier. It was an afternoon paper which meant you started work around 8 a.m.

Because it was my first real job and it was important to me to do well, I hard-wired my brain to wake up at 6 a.m. Not 5:55. Not 6:05. Six on the dot. It was a little bit weird how mechanical this became since I was gallivanting like a rock star at night with no effect on the 6 o’clock regaining of consciousness.

I was a robot.

Years wore on. I wound up at the Los Angeles Times, a morning paper, and the 6 a.m. thing became a thing of the past. The notion of sleeping in began to come into play.

After the Times, I wound up in the philanthropy world (as a communications guy, not a donor, I hasten to add). Other than writing all kinds of nonsense and editing all sorts of silly stuff, I can barely remember what I did all day.

Thus there was little incentive to get to work promptly in the morning.

During this six-year period, Jane and I were working and basically living in two cities, New York and Philadelphia, and getting together on the weekends. It was stressful at first. I joke now that it probably saved the marriage.

But it had to end and it did in a way I never saw coming. After years of working in a newspaper industry whose business model had been blown apart by Craig’s List (although it was not that clear back then) we all had weathered layoffs and cutbacks.

In the philanthropy world, we give away money and don’t worry about the bottom line. What’s to worry about? Yet one day, my boss, who was pretty worthless, said I was being let go because of declines in assets due to the dot com bust. I was blown away.

But we had already sold the Philly house and in some ways the timing couldn’t have been better. We had already moved ahead on buying our place on the Island.

Two major changes occurred: We both lived in Manhattan mostly full time, and I entered the era of my writing and editing consultant life, which is the ultimate no-need-to-get-up-in-the-morning-life. Except a strange thing happened: I got hooked on the morning arrival of the New York Times.

Back then, ages ago before COVID, a Latino couple would deliver newspapers throughout the building, usually landing a Times at the apartment door around 5 a.m.

Much like my robot persona back in Vermont, my mind became hyper-attuned to the sound of the paper’s arrival. And I would get up, make coffee and start reading. And thus a new morning routine became hard-wired.

Once the plague cemented itself in Manhattan, the Latino couple and others like them were banned and I haven’t seen them since, meaning, God forbid, I have to go to the lobby and fetch my own paper. But the absence of the thump of the paper against the door is greatly disconcerting.

I’m beginning to sleep in. (If I sleep in long enough, one of the building guys eventually will bring it up.) But the good old 5 o’clock days are over.

Recently, hearing the patter of hurricane rain on the air conditioner, I think I turned a corner. For a geezer like me, sleeping in is an earned benefit of making it this long. Let one of the building guys bring it up.

But I would prefer they make a thump on the door.