As the Bay Area gets pounded with yet another atmospheric river, I find myself sitting at my desk in my home office writing about why I’m awake at midnight. The wind is howling outside, and a significant amount of water is flowing off the rooftop and down through the rainspout on the other side of the office wall. It’s an all-too-often sound in what has become the wettest winter on record in California. But that’s not what’s keeping me awake.

I got to bed early tonight. I’m fairly certain it was before 8:30 p.m. Helping Kathy take care of Penny and Scarlett every day requires a good amount of energy, and by Thursday night, I’m usually pretty beat. I wanted to get a sufficient amount of sleep tonight so that I could function effectively tomorrow. I didn’t hear the first text at 8:22 p.m. 

Given the very good possibility of a power outage tonight, I made sure to recharge the battery in my cell phone earlier in the evening. I also put it on silent mode before going to sleep. But a little after 11 p.m., I heard the first of several Bzzt! sounds. I ignored it. Over the twenty minutes, as I dozed in and out of sleep, it continued… Bzzt!… Bzzt!… Bzzt! 

Finally, my curiosity got the better of me. I thought that, perhaps, something of importance was going on that I should check out. Well, that’s not exactly what it was. 

I’m included in a group text with a number of my St. Gabriel School Class of ’68 classmates. We use the group text to share details of our occasional get-togethers. It can be an effective tool, and I stress can be. Tonight, the hot topic, which was a continuation of a previous discussion, was about where group members were baptized. Then one person mentioned our third grade teacher, Sister Mary Roberta, who presented a few select students with excellence in handwriting certificates, and welcomed some students into the Captain Boy Savior Club. The what?

Several of those in our text group had never heard of this club, but I had, though I was never a member. The group recognized those students whose behavior was consistently exemplary. Yeah, as I said, I was not a club member. As I was reading about all this, the Bzzt!… Bzzt!… Bzzt! continued incessantly. After a while, I decided to respond to some of the comments that had been made. Within minutes, a very sobering message arrived.

“Shouldn’t you guys be in bed? It’s 8:27 a.m. here in France. We are nine hours ahead of you.”

Um,… yeah. Good point. What were we doing? By then we had said pretty much all that could be said about the Captain Boy Savior Club, so I decided to go back to sleep,… but no. Bzzt!… Bzzt!… Bzzt!… It just wasn’t working, so I got up to write this article.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like these folks! I enjoy being in contact with them, sharing memories of our years at St. Gabriel School, and updating each other on our lives today, but I also need to get some sleep! I’m going to give it another try now. It’s 12:40 a.m.

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