Last night: What joy! All kids were in bed by nine o'clock and my wife had the telephone permanently glued to her ear talking to somebody about something . It must have been really important since the conversation lasted well over an hour. With no chores, no homework and no one to talk to, I curled up into bed, turned on some obscure sports channel and drifted off to sleep. It may have been the best Sunday night I can remember on record.
It all came to a crashing end at 2.49am. I was awoken from my slumbers by a repetitive high piercing alarm emanating from a car parked out on the street somewhere in the neighborhood. I looked over to my wife, who had for a change, quietly come to bed and she wasn't stirring. The cat was curled up in a tight ball shape, lying on a pillow she shares with my wife and was snoring quite loudly. The car alarm noise continued.
I knew it was a car alarm because car alarms sound different from home and store alarms. They start off with the loud whaling sounds, spaced out about a second and a half apart and just as soon as you have gotten used to their annoying noise, the intense deafening beeps commence, half a second apart and then it all stops. I didn't get out of bed since I knew that after a minute or so of constant annoying sounds all would be quiet. I must have drifted off again into the land of sheep counting, since my next recollection was jumping out of bed, distressed at the recurrence of the aforementioned car alarm. This time I ventured over to the window to see if i could see the wretched vehicle.
Obviously the car had not been stolen as the alarm would have been disconnected. It may have been broken into but that was also most unlikely. You don't often notice vandalized cars sitting on the streets in the Upper East Side. What most likely happened is that a giant rat saw something sitting on top of an alarmed car and ran up its hood onto its roof setting off the alarm. The noise would have startled the rodent and he or she would have leaped off and scurried away. The damage would have been done and the alarm would continue to blare until either; the owner came to disarm it, the battery in the alarm wore out or someone got so annoyed he demolished the whole car with a baseball bat ,including smashing the alarm hidden behind the dashboard.
The chances of the owner even hearing his car alarm blaring were limited. The alternate side of the street parking rules in New York City means that those who abide by this ridiculous system and insist on parking in Manhattan for free, often have to park several blocks away from where they live. Residents circle a wide neighborhood looking for vacant parking spaces and are willing to leave their cars up to half a mile away from their places of abode. This scenario didn't help me at all last night. I couldn't actually see the culprit car as it was out of eye shot but from the noise alone I could ascertain that it was stationed somewhere between first and second avenue and a little north of 80th street. There was nothing I could do lest get dressed and go outside and stand over the car and curse and maybe kick a wheel or two. It was raining. I declined the temptation.
The alarm again abated and so I trudged back to the bedroom, slightly hunched over from fatigue. I was too tired to even hold my head up on my shoulders and I could almost hear my bed covers beckoning me back to the warmth and snugness of my marital bed. The wife had moved half a foot over towards my section making it very difficult for me to turn over. So I lay there on my back, and closed my eyes awaiting round three of the alarm fiasco. This insanity repeated itself five times at intervals of ten minutes and each time I awoke I attempted to replicate the sounds with my mouth very quietly, counting each different beep stanza of the alarm until it became peaceful again. I had learned the series of noises by rote by the time the alarm wore itself out.
What seemed like just a few minutes later my own alarm from the clock radio went off for a brief second until I instinctively hit the snooze button giving me ten extra minutes sleep. On the second snooze my wife screamed out that I was being really selfish and to stop snoozing and just get up for work. I just lay there in bed, snooze turned off , shaking my head in astonishment and then she looked at me lovingly while stretching and asked " did you sleep well honey?"
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