The Blue Pill vs. The Rolling Stones

Packing for my trip to Amarillo this summer, I tossed a sleeping pill into the container with my vitamins. I don’t use a sleeping pill very often, but if I am too keyed up when I go to bed (which I thought could happen after hours of laughing and talking with a friend I haven’t seen in six years) or am anxious, sometimes either I can’t go to sleep at all or I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and cannot go back to sleep. My doctor prescribed a very low-dose sleeping aid; it helps me fall asleep but its effects wear off after a couple hours.

Although Laura and I stayed up too late on Saturday night, talking and laughing into the wee hours, I had no trouble sleeping. (The two bottles of wine we drank while staying up so late may have helped with that.) Before we went down to breakfast, I knocked back all my morning vitamins, including a blue capsule that I took to be an acid reducer.

After breakfast, as we were packing up to head out, I thought about the blue capsule I had tossed in with the vitamins. I looked in my vitamin bottle. Yup, I definitely took the blue capsule before breakfast. Then came this conversation:

Me: Bummer.

Laura: What?

Me: I took a sleeping pill before breakfast.

Laura: WHAT?!

Me: My acid reducer and my sleeping pill are both blue capsules. I didn’t bring an acid reducer because they are an every-other-day pill and I took one yesterday. I brought the sleeping pill in case I got too keyed up and couldn’t sleep. I just took the sleeping pill.

Laura: Are you sure?

Me: (Yawn) Yeah. I’m sure.

It wasn’t that big a deal. Laura wanted additional knitting practice and I needed caffeine, so we went to a nearby Starbucks where she learned to purl and to cast off and then practiced everything she’d learned. I answered her knitting questions, drank some espresso beverages, and yawned a lot.

We stayed at Starbucks three hours. By the time Laura was feeling comfortable with her new knitting skills, I was wide awake. We hit the road.

By the time I was halfway home it had begun to rain, giving me a barometric headache. I was surrounded by 18-wheelers, half of whom were crawling along I-40 doing 50 while the other half were rushing by at 75. I was jittery from all that caffeine and not enough protein, I was low on gas, and a bathroom break sounded really good. I stopped in the next town.

Before I re-hit the road, I checked my phone and discovered a text from my sister. I decided to prolong my break and called her back. We discussed our respective exciting weekend activities. When I told her how I had mistaken my sleeping pill for an acid reducer and then spent some time at the coffee shop in Amarillo to sure I stayed awake on the way home, she told me a story of her own.

When Susan was a freshman in college in Wichita Falls, her boyfriend in Austin asked her to meet him in Dallas for the weekend because he had tickets to see The Rolling Stones. Woo hoo!!!!! They saw the concert, stayed out pretty much all night, partied up a storm, and had the most fabulous weekend possible!

Dallas is a only couple hours from Wichita Falls, but there’s not much to see along the way. Typically that’s no biggie, but after a party-filled, no-sleep weekend, Susan was exhausted. About halfway to the dorm, she realized she needed to take a nap before she fell asleep at the wheel. She turned onto a farm road and drove far enough that no one could see her car from the highway and she could just barely see the roof of the farmhouse in the distance. She then drove into the empty pasture, leaned her seat back, and went to sleep.

She’s not sure how long she was asleep when she blearily awakened with the feeling something was wrong. She came wide awake when she realized her car was shaking. Bolting upright, she saw that she was surrounded and her car was being pushed back and forth by  . . . . . cows. They were all jostling for a better view of the girl in the car, pushing their noses up to the windows, and shoving each other around. The car was rocking pretty hard. Susan was afraid the car was going to tip over, and she was going to have to explain to the parents what she was doing somewhere between Dallas and Wichita Falls in a cow pasture on Sunday evening.

She fired up engine, eased her way (honking) through the cattle, and hauled butt back to the highway. The rest of her trip was uneventful. The parents never knew she spent the weekend in Dallas with her boyfriend.

Susan and I should probably not take any road trips together.