Rebecca Dudley

It’s hard to fall sleep in my childhood bedroom and disorienting to wake up there. I have sometimes slept so soundly I woke not knowing what decade it was. Other times spent almost the whole night awake, listening to the parties at the university, up the hill. “Chug! Chug! Chug!,” then a moment of fragile, untrustworthy silence, followed by an explosive group “WHOA!” and raucous laughter. I imagined students weaving, stumbling, falling, vomiting. As a child I had been comforted by the sound of students calling out to each other in the night. I was better at sleeping then.
Even when fully awake it is a disorienting room. Familiar smells, but decades later: wood smoke, lamp oil, must; familiar sounds, but decades later: wind, mice, squirrels. The squirrels in the walls became so ordinary, when they would (temporarily) leave I found it hard to sleep without the sound of scampering feet. 
One visit, after bedtime, I could hear dad watching “The Tonight Show,” so I tip-toed downstairs. I asked if he had a clock I could borrow. He stalked purposefully to the kitchen (muffled searching through drawers). He came back with a timer. It was like a stopwatch, but would run for hours. “If you start it when you go to sleep, you’ll know how much you slept in the morning!” This assumed that I would 1) sleep, and 2) sleep until morning. But I loved his can-do attitude. And the timer worked pretty well, in spite of feeling like a time bomb; it counted time in tenths of seconds, so it always looked like an emergency. 
The next time I visited, Dad gave me a compact plastic LED clock from Radio Shack. It did not project light, but sat dark, until touched. It has been knocked off bedside tables, dropped, squashed into suitcases. It has had its battery contacts cleaned by a bemused clockmaker, twice. It has sometimes stopped working completely. Fresh batteries had no effect. But then months later, I would open it to see if it was really dead and it would peacefully pulse at me, the wrong time.