This weekend my wife and I visited my mother- and father-in-law's home in the Kenwood area of Duluth. Because of a late night on Saturday, we decided to stay the night.
When I crawled up to bed, I looked around the spare bedroom we were staying in for reading materials. I can't seem to sleep without reading first, so I looked for a good magazine or book to lull me to sleep. I found a book called "Dave Barry turns 50." To many people's surprise, I was a newspaper junkie as a child (the Duluth News-Tribune and Herald was the only newspaper I knew) in the early '80s, and had read Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck columns for years.
Actually, as a kid, I thought both Barry and Bombeck were born and raised in Duluth. "Boy, this area pumps out good columnists!" I would say to myself. I was a big fan of Jim Heffernan and Jim Northrup's writings, so I assumed all writers in the DNT&H were from the area. Childhood naivete.
Anyway, while reading this book in bed at 11:30 p.m., I began to realize I made a horrible mistake. Usually, my choice of reading materials at night consists of NHL stat magazines, draft previews and yearbooks, which usually put me right to sleep. This time I thought I was safe from being kept up all night by a good book because there is no possible way I could find true entertainment about someone turning 50 - especially when I'm far from it. Wrong!
At this point, my wife had found her way to bed and was sound asleep, and the sorry attempts at holding in my laughter began.
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If I don't plan on finishing a book, I flip around from chapter to chapter until I find something good. So the first thing I went to in this book was the chapter on 25 things Barry had learned over his 50 years on the planet. "There's a fine line between a hobby and mental illness" was one of the things he learned, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Eventually, he told a story about how people who were previously asleep answer a ringing phone as though they were not even close to sleeping.
"HELLO?! I'M NOT SLEEPING!"
I was doing everything I could to not laugh out loud at that point, but I let out a big "try not to laugh" snort, and woke up my wife.
Busted. Well, back to hockey magazines.
Pine Journal Editor Mat Gilderman can be contacted at: mgilderman@pinejournal.com .
