Bed in Summer

OK, I admit it: I'm a big 'ol grouch today. I'm over-tired and under-slept and under-stimulated and over-indulged and it is a beautiful fall day and because I am supposed to be "taking it easy" this weekend, I am inside looking out and feeling grouchy!! I think not having had my tea yet today might have something to do with it too.

I am reminded of a poem I loved as a little girl, about a child who had to go to bed when the sun was still shining. It took place in summer, when the days were long, and bedtime fell before the sun did. The illustration showed a child sitting in his pajamas in front of a window, watching summer leaves dancing in the light, lamenting the fact that his lot was to go to bed. I have always been struck by that poem, by the comedy of how unfair life can be, of how the seasons stretch and shorten regardless of our wants and needs, of the unseen, unyielding hand of the rule-maker.

I identify with the boy in the pajamas. Of looking out at all the life and, more, the potential, still going on while he remains separate, coping with the rules of his life. I've always hated to miss anything. And I want so many different things out of life that I always felt I was missing out on something. Heading to bed when another part of me wanted to play.

Sometimes, as an adult, I've enjoyed the perversity of going to bed when the world was cue-ing me to go out: pulling down the shades to watch a movie on a sunny afternoon, climbing into bed in the smack middle of a weekend day, cranking the A.C. and donning a sweater in the height of summer's heat. Defiance. Control.

But mostly I've felt the limits of the window and the side of it I'm on, and a mix of guilt and confusion, wondering whom I should be taking my cues from: the outside world or the internal rule maker. I feel the advantages and losses in both choices.

Here, by the way, is the poem:

Bed in Summer, by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?