Although I’m as excited as everyone else, every year I seem to be having a harder time waiting up for the New Year. This year I might have managed better had we joined my Antonio cousins at Jun and Remy’s home nearby. Vergel and I missed it and stayed home, nursing a mean cold we didn’t want to spread.

Jun’s home has always been a fun place for Sunday lunches; New Year’s Eve dinner would have doubtless been a blast. The danger is to overeat and overstay. The best part of an Antonio gathering is the mix of illuminating conversations between younger and older generations, and, with Chito around, a rich sampling of irreverent humor and laughter is guaranteed. In such company I have no trouble staying awake.

What didn’t help our effort to stay valiantly awake at home was having to eat early, at about 6:30, so our kasambahay could leave at around 8 for her night off, to be back late on New Year’s Day. She served a home-cooked dinner, and everything had been cleaned and put away, except for the wine glasses and other things from our midnight snack—a huge plate of antipasto: majestic ham, Italian salami, salted walnuts, stuffed olives, cheeses and pickled artichokes.

So sleepy

Our only guest was my once again bachelor and happy first son, Rob. First and only daughter Gia and family were also homebound—her help had gone on a day off, too. We both laughed on the phone when she too was having the same anxiety of not being able to stay up to welcome the New Year!

“Ma, it’s only 8, and we’re done with dinner! How can I last? We’re all so sleepy already.”

The lame advice I could offer was to not put on her natural sleep-inducing pajamas yet. I didn’t tell her, but I already had put myself in that precise danger, having changed into my old and all-too-comfortable and suitable polka-dotted duster. Midnight seemed so far away, two hours yet past my new bedtime.

Unlike my mom, who required us and our families at her home for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve dinner and midnight Mass afterward, I set no such rules myself.

However, since the turn of the millennium, after moving to the small condominium Gia and her husband owned, while their family moved from a rented house to our five-bedroom house in Valle Verde, we’ve been spending Christmas Eve at their place, and for a few years now doing so in their three-bedroom condo in Mandaluyong. I’d bring my girl Lanie and some of the main dishes to ease things for Gia and her lone help for the occasion.

This New Year, if I struggled harder to stay awake, it was also because I had been putting much effort into getting eight hours of sleep every night. I read that it was particularly important for people my age, for damage repair. That meant out by 11 and up by 7. I’m in the bedroom by 10, done with ablutions and a particular exercise: I put my feet up on the headboard for about 20 minutes, which proves so relaxing I not seldom fall asleep in the position. It took almost a whole year to become a habit for me.

Mild insomnia

I don’t know that any of my friends buy my theory. In fact, most of them seem able to do with less sleep—quite a few actually live with mild insomnia, but seem just as alert if not more alert than I. But I am myself sold to it. When I get bathroom interruptions, I’m able still to go back to asleep easily.

I go for at least seven hours of sleep. Instead of buying food supplements on anybody’s advice, which only got me into further trouble in the past, I find myself trusting what works for me by experience as the safer alternative. I have no illusions: I know that at my age the body only naturally loses agility and strength.

So, I pray:

Dear God, If I am allowed to ask you to preserve anything of mine, let it be my mind, which, after all, defines who I am. If a good eight-hour sleep helps, as I believe it does, I’ll do that part. I’d like to keep on learning, since despite my years there is, only too obviously, so much yet I don’t know. May I further ask that I be able keep that aspect of the mind called imagination, so that I might see what is possible even when it is not yet there —the same imagination J. K. Rowling defines as what we use to be able to think ourselves in other people’s places without actually experiencing their plight, in order that we may truly empathize with our fellowmen, as only befits the human beings you had ideally created.

Above all, please let me keep my share of your gift of a sense of humor. According to George Burns—or someone as smart and funny who lived as long— old age is proof enough that God, Himself, has a sense of humor. I ask this so that I may never take myself or life itself too seriously, especially in my later years when I might need it most. I’d also like to be able to laugh with You when I finally get the joke that is old age.