THINKING IN THE DARK

Periodically I go through times of waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to fall back asleep. My first four hours of sleep are good, but when I’m in that cycle it’s downhill from then on.

Last night was one of those nights. I think I woke up around 3:30 a.m. and what I heard was the noise level on the freeway one mile south of us. We live on the fringe of an industrial area, and the big delivery trucks generally get going on the freeway about then. I could hear them back away from their loading docks – bells dinging as the trucks back up – and then the engines straining to get the loaded trucks up and on the roads. An hour earlier, there is no such noise. I don’t think it is the noise that wakes me up, but once awake, the stillness of the night amplifies every sound and I can tell exactly what they are doing.

You’d think I would hear a cricket or a frog, but no, mostly only trucks and freeways. I also heard a siren start up from a fire-engine that pulled out of the station directly across the freeway from our complex. I knew that if the siren was of short duration, that meant it came across the freeway overpass and turned into our complex. Since we live in a 55+ development, unfortunately we have a lot of such emergencies in the night. I heard a dog give a few barks, probably while his owner was taking him outside for a potty break. And I heard the early-morning Fedex or UPS plane take off from Ontario Airport, loaded with packages to be delivered elsewhere.

Along our Van Buren avenue, probably the biggest non-freeway road in western Riverside County, there is a Union Pacific train track that brings freight trains from the yards in Los Angeles out to Riverside and then heads them north. Our area is so rural that we have mostly grade-level train crossings, with long arms and bells that keep the vehicular traffic away from the moving trains. Sometimes in the night I can hear those bells too as the arms come down. Since the trains are required to blow their whistles at every grade crossing, I can hear them as they move through our intersections – first Bellegrave, next Rutile, then Jurupa, finally Limonite. There was a period of time when I think one of the engineers, or whoever makes the train toot, had a wife or a girlfriend that he wanted to say “Hi” to as he passed through the area – and his simple toot “hello” took on the rhythm of “Shave and a haircut – six bits.” It always made me laugh when I heard it. I think the people who lived closer to the tracks didn’t see the humor in it, but since I was already awake, I did.

Last night I heard the trains, three or four of them, but alas, no extra messages were sent!

While I was lying there in my bed, trying to relax and enjoy the sounds – none of which were really obnoxious but just happened at a bad hour – a vestige of a song flitted through my mind. I could hear a few lines but couldn’t dredge up anything more than that. What I remembered was this little snippit:

Now the rains a-fallin’
Hear the train a-callin’,
Whooee!
Hear that lonesome whistle
Blowin’ cross the trestle,
Whooee
A-whooee-ah-whooee,
Clickety-clack, echoing back,……………………..and the next line was missing from my memory.

While I was trying to find the missing line I drifted away from the night noises and fell back asleep.

This morning the missing line – and the song title – appeared as if by magic. “The Blues in the Night.” The lyrics were written by Johnny Mercer in 1941. Harold Arlen supplied the tune. I knew it because of the 1950’s version popularized by Rosemary Clooney. It really didn’t have anything much to do with “night” but more with the blues over love, or lack thereof..

Do you remember it too?

My mama done told me,
When I was in pigtails,
My mama done told me, Hon,
A man’s gonna sweet talk
And give you the big eye
But when the sweet talk is done.
A man is a two-face,
A worrisome thing who’ll leave you to sing,
The blues in the night

Now the rains a-fallin’
Hear the train a-callin’,
Whooee!
Hear that lonesome whistle
Blowin’ cross the trestle,
Whooee
A-whooee-ah-whooee,
Clickety-clack, echoing back,
The blues in the night.

I can’t say my night’s sleep was a total lost cause. None of my listening and musing was because of a worry; it just turned into an hour or so of listening, thinking and remembering – always a pleasant state to be in. The only thing that could have made it better would be the song of a Nightingale, except here in California we only have Mockingbirds to sing in the night, and mostly they can drive you crazy if you let them.