Just 30 more minutes...PULEEEEZE!

Medical Center

Of course my bedtime  changed over The years but there are benchmarks that stand out in my memory for different reasons.   I remember being sent to bed at a very young age and hating that we had pillows so flat they hardly mattered.  Mom and Daddy had big feather pillows, but Jamie and I had  pillows that were made from a coral colored floral print fabric that when folded in half, and let me say here for the record that not only did they fold in half they folded easily in half,  still had barely enough loft to lift our heads up off the mattress.  When we whined about them and asked why we could not have "real" pillows like theirs we were told that big pillows where not healthy or safe for little children...I am not sure exactly where the danger was, possible suffocation?  Chronic neck pain?  Who knows, but what I was sure of a few years later was that no matter what harm could befall me from an overly lofty pillow there was nothing that the handsome Dr. Gannon of "Medical Center" could not cure.  At this stage in my upbringing I had moved past the 7:30 bedtime of my early youth and had gained a whole hour!  At first flush this seems like a real victory but not on Medical Center nights.  You see, It came on at 8 o'clock  and it was an hour long show.  I always got hooked into the story during those last 30 minutes of my day and invariably I would be sent to bed promptly at 8:30.  I would ask to stay up for the last 30 minutes of the show, but I don't think Mom ever relented.  Her stock reply was that I knew I would not be able to see the whole show, so why did I start watching it in the first place?  This was before the days of a TV in every room, so it was watch what she was watching or go do something else.  It was not lost on me even at that young age what a looker Chad Everett was and I always held out hope that this would be the week she would fail to notice the time.  So I gambled and lost over and over again.  It would seem a sorry and pitiful thing except it lead to one of my all time favorite things...going to sleep with the flickering blue light of a TV on in another room casting shadows under the door. It may be why I still fall asleep to a TV show flickering in the dark every night.