Lulled to sleep by the stars

I hate watching movies with my dad.
I love my father very much, and I’m incredibly grateful for the fact that he did indeed bring me into this world. I imagine that my life would be a great deal less substantial had my father not been around.
But that does not diminish the fact that I hate watching movies with my dad.
Some people talk through movies. Some people point out all the things that make a PG-13 movie PG-13 or an R movie R. Some people walk in and out of the room constantly, obscuring your view of the screen. My dad sleeps, and his sleep brings forth a deafening cacophony that can only be compared to sticking your head into the exhaust of a jet engine at full power. And that’s when he’s sleeping “quietly”.
My dad is a policeman, and he works really long shifts, sometimes up to 12 hours, and mostly as the 911 dispatcher. I’m sure you can imagine the high level of stress that comes with the job. I guess that explains some of the problem, but I still don’t understand how one man can sit down wanting to watch a movie he just bought earlier that day and be asleep before the opening titles are finished.
I’m not joking when I say this: Dad once fell asleep before the DVD menu fully loaded.
Dad can (and does) sleep through any movie I throw at him. War movies, comedies, dramas, it really doesn’t matter. Dad is going to fall asleep. This is a given. The big problem comes from the fact that he tends to fall asleep in generally the same spots in any movie. And so, until I came to Harding and watched the movie by myself, I thought Jake and Elwood, from The Blues Brothers, were “on a mission from GGSSKRSNRKK”.
While it’s frustrating enough having to sit through Dad’s nasal symphony in each movie, it’s often worse when we have company. In a typical scenario, when somebody comes to visit our house for a few hours, we go through a standard procedure of Rushton hospitality: way too much food, a little bit of after-dinner music to complement our desserts, and then a movie. Dad is asleep halfway between the dining room and his armchair. Our company normally notices Dad and says something to the effects of “Wow, he must really be tired. I don’t know how you can fall asleep during Back to the Future!” This is when the magical hypnotic rhythms of Dad’s apnea start to take full effect, and pretty soon I’m listening to my Dad snoring away, and our company in… uh… company. “One-point-twenty-one HRRRNNNNNKKGGGKKKKK-zzzzzzzz! Great Scott!”
As bad as that is, I’m about to one-up myself. I present to you Gene Weaver, Searcy policeman, husband of Dr. Beckie Weaver of the communications department, best friend to my father, and loud sleeper. For most of my formative life, Gene and Dad would sit me down in the living room at either our house or the Weavers’, and we’d all watch a cowboy movie. Dad and Gene wanted to make sure that I grew up seeing the classics, which is certainly a noble goal. But the problem comes from their insistence on catching up on sleep right when Doc Holliday first comes onto the screen. Have you ever seen Tombstone? Remember the part where Doc first shows up and he’s playing poker with Ed Bailey? “Five hundred. Must be a HORKKKKKKKKKKKKKSSSSNNNNNNNGKKKKKKK-GGGGHHHUUUUUUUKKKKKKKK”, and the next thing I know the hand is over and Ed Bailey gets stabbed by Doc.
One bright side to living with my Dad and his deafening sleep… I am never afraid for my safety at home when Dad is asleep. And it’s not because Dad is a policeman that I sleep fearlessly. It’s because Dad snores at such an unholy volume and with such ferocity that anybody who breaks into our home during the night is surely going to think that there is a chainsaw wielding lunatic in the bedroom upstairs, simply waiting for the chance to unleash his STIHL-brand justice.
I fully realize that my father is not the only person in our household who snores. I’ve been known to rattle a few ceiling tiles myself. When I was a counselor at church camp a few years ago, all the boys in my cabin wet their beds the first two nights because they thought my snoring was the cry of some hideous beast spawned of the dark pits of the eternal blackness. Pretty imaginative for a group of 14 year olds, huh?
I spent a weekend with my Dad not too long ago. We were staying at a ranch owned by a friend of the family, and Dad and I were sharing a room with another father-son duo, Gary and Chris Wright, from our church back home. Gary and Chris got no sleep. I got a little bit of sleep, only to be reawakened by my Dad falling asleep. I didn’t fall asleep again until Dad woke up to fix breakfast, at which point the Wrights thought they could get some sleep, when in fact they were to be interrupted by me finally falling asleep again. Poor guys.
What is it in our divine design that makes the most peaceful time of mine and Dad’s day the loudest? Why is it that I can’t fall asleep to anything too loud, but I sleep louder than anything I have? I don’t have any answers, I only have a prayer: I hope my wife is a deep sleeper.