You just might be a bedneck

Jeff Foxworthy has a famous comedy bit in which he suggests that, as a method for keeping Jehovah’s Witnesses from knocking on your door and waking you up on a weekend morning, you should draw a chalk outline of a body on your front porch, and then sprinkle some religious leaflets around it.

After you have done this, he declares, “You can sleep ‘til noon if y’ount to.”

That punch line always grabbed me, because until very recently in my life, sleeping ‘til noon meant getting up early, at least on days with no work or school. Noon is just an awfully early time for a joke about waking up late. Most teenagers would probably identify better with, “You can sleep ‘til Mom gets home from work and drops her purse on your head.”

One summer evening many years ago, when my parents had some friends over for dinner on a Friday night, my mom’s friend Barbara asked me what time I’d gotten up that day.

“It was definitely before three o’clock,” I told her. I knew this because Mom used to get home from work around 3:30, and if I hadn’t showered and eaten breakfast by then, our house was like a scene from the show “24” that ends with Jack Bauer covered in soot and pieces of people.

Barbara stared at me in disbelief. “Don’t you have to go to the bathroom? Even if I wanted to sleep past ten, my bladder wouldn’t let me.”

She had a point. Only someone with the holding capacity of an oil tanker could sleep too far past noon without a pit stop. It’s more like sleep ‘til noon, nap ‘til three.

But those days are long gone. Mr. Foxworthy was actually right on the money, because once you’re an adult, noon becomes an impossibly late time to start the day, especially if you’re married to my wife Kara.

Incidentally, I know that I’m an adult now because when I was eating a bowl of cereal for dinner the other night, I actually had the thought: “These Lucky Charms just have too many marshmallows in them.” A kid would never think something like that. Also, I have to shave my back occasionally. Kids don’t do that, either.

Anyway, Kara has one of those internal clocks that I have always lacked. It tells her to wake up at a respectable time on a Saturday, even though the sun has barely been up for five hours.
“Baby, it’s time to get up,” she says, nudging me on the shoulder.

I squint one eye open, reach out and poke her on the forehead.

“Hey, what was that for?” she asks.

“I’m hitting the snooze button,” I reply.

But that approach never works for very long. Once Kara’s awake, it’s only a matter of time before the Grumblebunny attacks. The Grumblebunny is Kara’s alter ego; he comes out of his hole when she hasn’t been fed. The only way to make the Grumblebunny go back into his hole is to find something to eat, pronto. I actually have my own inner-Grumblebunny as well, but Kara doesn’t feel the need to assign nicknames to my moods so that she can safely make fun of them.

“What are we gonna eat?” she asks me. By this point, she’s been reading for two hours, and the Grumblebunny has been inching out of his hole the entire time.

“I think we still have milk. Let’s just have some cereal.”

“I don’t want cereal. We just had that for dinner. I want something good.”

So we wander into the kitchen and take stock of the fridge.

“OK, all we have is beer, ketchup, a mushy cucumber and an egg. Want me to whip up an omelette?” I ask.

The Grumblebunny requests pepperoni and black olives on the pizza that I’m about to order.

If you send Mike Todd an email at cox1013@hotmail.com, you just might be a bedneck.