sleep, and the things one thinks about when one loses it

I woke up just after 5am to garbage trucks caught in their daily cacophonous ballet and tried for nearly an hour to go back to sleep after staying up late watching too much Dexter (because this is how we roll here in the big city on a beautiful Friday night). I lay in bed in the dark whispering to the cat (who came for a snuggle, pleased to have someone awake in the midst of her nocturnal prowls) and thinking about some gorgeous silk I bought recently and all its myriad possibilities for becoming something even more beautiful.

Two mornings ago it was a foghorn at half past four booming its way up the Hudson -- an unusual noise despite many recent foggy mornings (thick enough to disappear New Jersey, the river, the buildings across the street), and enough to startle us from sleep and keep us awake until it was far enough north, twenty minutes later, to become just a diminishing echo of itself.

This morning, after sleep ran off with the garbage trucks and refused to come back, I lay in bed cuddling with the cat (who purred and curled her fluffy sweet self into my side, hoarding my warmth in the pre-dawn chill) and thinking about ivory-colored silk and springtime brides and that damnable foghorn. I thought about how odd it was that we had never heard that sound before, booming out again and again, echoing across the river, ricocheting off the cliffs of New York and New Jersey, our windows and dreams and nightmares quaking in its path. It seems like such irresistible power: blowing that horn and single-handedly dragging hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sweetly or not so sweetly sleeping citizens from their beds.

I wondered how it is they manage to stop themselves from sounding that horn all the time.