I have to stay up late.
My friends and I had a running joke in college that I could never go to bed before midnight. My sleep schedule and own overcommitments were obstacles to be sure, but they were not the source of the issue. The real problem — some might even go so far as to call it a curse — began when I became a Resident Assistant in Trowbridge Hall.
In exchange for their service, RAs are permitted to live in a coveted single room with no roommate. A position of petty authority and the promise of living alone delighted me, and, by the fall of my sophomore year, I had begun my reign over the west end of the second floor of Trowbridge Hall.
The curse made its first appearance one chilly night that fall. I made the rare decision to go to bed before midnight because I was recovering from the flu. I took a healthy dose of NyQuil and snuggled into my twin XL bed. I was awoken by a bright flash and the horrible, piercing noise that haunts my memory even today.
Trowbridge Hall was designed by architect Albert Kahn of Detroit industrial fame. When it opened in 1925, it was advertised as being completely fireproof. This news never reached the Kalamazoo Fire Marshal, who decided it would be best to install the most frightful system of fire alarms ever devised.
At all hours of the day and night, dozens of zealous smoke detectors look after Trowbridge Hall, each waiting for its time to shine — to save the world from a bonfire five blocks over or the slightest hint of burned popcorn. At a moment’s notice, they could set off a horrible series of piercing alarms and bright lights. Whoever designed the system knew that college students — notoriously impervious to risk or good judgment as they are — could only be driven out of the building by a system that created a sensory experience so truly unbearable that they would have no choice.
It was burned toast (prepared in a contraband toaster) that woke me from my NyQuil coma that night and caused me to fall out of my bed and onto the linoleum floor. Moments later, I was wearing a bathrobe and flip-flops and trying to remember the appropriate phone number to call while I stood in a parking lot full of puzzled eighteen-year-olds.
The next time I went to bed before midnight, somebody down the hall got sick and I was awoken from my slumber. Another night, after I went to bed at 11:45 and somebody set pasta on fire (a feat which requires leaving a pot on the stove so long that all of the water boils off and leaves a smoldering pasta hunk), I became truly convinced that I could not go to bed early. On some nights, I would sit in a chair around 11:50 trying desperately to keep myself awake, terrified of whatever consequence dozing off might bring.
Staying up late was never a complete guarantee that I would have a restful night (though it did help). After many months, I became very good at managing nighttime emergencies. I would handle early morning fire alarms with matching pajamas and the stoicism of a seasoned veteran. In a hallmark moment of personal pride, an ambulance driver once asked me the secret to keeping my bathrobe so white as I led him up a stairwell. (The secret, dear reader, is laundry bluing and German detergent.)
Eventually, I grew overconfident and convinced myself that the curse was lifted. On the night of January 29, 2019, in the middle of a series of snow days during a legendary cold snap, I ran out of things to do for the evening and decided to tempt fate. The cold, I figured, would keep people in line.
On the morning of Wednesday, January 30th, I woke up undisturbed at 10:30 and, for a few brief moments of total bliss, imagined the curse to be truly gone.
The lowest recorded temperature in Kalamazoo that day was fifteen degrees below zero (-26º C). It had mercifully risen to twelve below when I decided to take a shower at the same time that somebody across the building decided to make bacon.
A person at least has to respect a curse that has such a cruel sense of humor, though that was not my gut reaction when the familiar cry of the banshee and bright flashing lights interrupted my shower. The stoic man with matching pajamas did not greet the hoard of frozen students in the Trowbridge Hall parking lot. They were met instead by a man with only a bathrobe, flip-flops, and hair that had frozen solid, hissing something about “suffering for those responsible.”
Life is mostly different outside of Trowbridge Hall. I have my own kitchen and bathroom. I am allowed to use toasters and sleep in a bed larger than an extra-long twin. Even so, my sleep schedule is still informed by a creeping fear of The Curse. I went to bed at eleven one night last month and found when I had woken up that the electricity had gone out on a perfectly clear morning, but it was, I figured, a coincidence — an aberration.
Last Saturday evening, I resolved to test my luck again and go to bed early. I arrived at my building moments before six fire trucks. You never can win.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
You Won’t Remember The Pandemic The Way You Think You Will
“In daily chitchat and in give-and-take on social media, we share with others how it started for us and how it’s going. We instinctively compare and match what we’ve got to what they’ve got… Within each community, for years to come, stories will be passed around, tweaked, and polished until a small number of gems come to represent This is what it was like to live through the coronavirus pandemic.”
“‘London Bridge is Down’: The Secret Plan for the Days After the Queen’s Death” by Sam Knight in The Guardian.
There was a happy time in my life during which I spent several days each week ringing church bells in Scotland (the details on this will have to wait for another day). In a cabinet in the bell tower sat a series of “mutes” — leather fixtures that give the ringing of the bells a sort of ghostly tone. Some of the mutes came out occasionally for particularly somber events — and, if the pandemic has not stopped bell ringing, are likely out this week following the death of Prince Philip.
At the bottom of the cabinet were other, special mutes. I never saw them used, and, when I asked what they were for, it was explained to me that they were reserved exclusively for the “death of the sovereign.”
These bell mutes are part of a vast infrastructure in the British Empire centered around preparing for a royal death — particularly that of the Queen. In broadcast booths, special indicator lights, once intended to warn of impending nuclear doom, inform broadcasters that the time has come to switch to a predetermined playlist of sad music. BBC presenters have black suits close at hand and pray, “Please, God, not on my shift.”