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The afternoon nap deserves respect
By Carl Heintze
Let us consider the afternoon nap.
The afternoon nap, as I see it, is a much neglected and yet very valuable custom.
Let us not confuse it with the siesta, however. The siesta is a Latino custom adopted because in hot climates, Spain and Mexico, for instance, it's not worth your while to go out in the sun between noon and 2 p.m. I don't know if people nap during the siesta or not. At least they get off the street.
I also see the gringo afternoon nap as of considerably shorter duration than the siesta. The nap doesn't have any rigid conventions associated with it. either. That is, people don't usually get off the street and into a dark room when they take afternoon naps.
A true afternoon nap is of short duration, maybe 20 minutes at most.
It follows lunch, although the precise time when it begins is uncertain. It could be right after the meal, or it could be as much as an hour later.
It starts when one is able to settle down comfortably in an easy chair (no lying down, please, in a completely recumbent posture) and sometimes is preceded by an attempt to read a book or a newspaper. The true nap doesn't permit much reading to be done, however.
Usually after a couple of pages the eyelids begin to lower, respiration slows, thought evaporates and for those few minutes everything becomes amnesic. The napper falls into a state that's not quite sleep and not quite wakefulness either.
Rather, it is utter placitude. It's sort of like sliding slowly into a bathtub of warm water (without the danger of drowning, of course). It's a state that doesn't last very long. Gradually one returns to the state of wakefulness, but, in good naps, slowly. Reality doesn't impose itself on the napper all at once. Instead, one awakes a little at a time, refreshed, ready to go on with the rest of the day.
That's the perfect afternoon nap.
I first became aware of the afternoon nap when I was a child in kindergarten. Our teacher got us all to fringe the edges of big sheets of wrapping paper with a pair of scissors. This was our nap "rug." We spread our individual "rugs" on the floor of the kindergarten room, chewed our graham crackers and drank our milk, and then lay down.
We were supposed to nap, but my recollection is we did more giggling and squirming about than sleeping. But at least we knew what a nap was by the time we moved on to the first grade, In the first grade, however, the nap disappeared, presumably on the theory that we had become older, stronger and less in need of midday recuperation. It never came back, not for years, not for much of a lifetime.
Then when I retired, I suddenly became aware of the importance of the afternoon nap again. I even learned that some people younger than I thought it important and managed to work it into their daily routine.
Now I feel an afternoon nap is a vital part of my day. I know that now without an afternoon nap, I tend to get pretty grouchy around five o'clock in the afternoon. I also know that trying to take a nap later in the day doesn't work. It only spoils one for a good night's sleep. Napping late means awakening in the middle of the night or early in the morning.
The nap has to be about the time of the natural downturn in the day, after lunch, after a good morning's work, when the slack in both you and the world has become evident.
Then sleep, as the saying goes, knits up the raveled sleeve of care, repairs the ravages of a hard morning's work, of too large a lunch, of too much concentration.
Unfortunately, for nappers, the afternoon nap has not become a part of American culture, as has the siesta in Latino lands. American employers don't like people napping on the job, no matter what the time of day, and the nap, so far as I know, has never become a part of work rules anywhere.
I do know a couple of executives, however, who, exerting the privileges which rank allows, take naps every afternoon. Once lunch is over, they tell their secretaries to hold all calls; they close their doors, they lean back in their chairs and snooze away for 20 minutes or a half hour.
In their companies, their naps, at least, have become an accepted, even sacred part of the work place. No one is supposed to disturb them during nap time on pain of death or any other punishment that the court martial may direct.
I think they are better persons for it.
And I kind of think we would all be better persons if the afternoon nap became a part of the culture of our land. But maybe it ought not to be legal, a clause in union contracts, a federal law spelled out in the Federal Register, something in need of interpretation by the Supreme Court.
If that happened it wouldn't be the afternoon nap. It would be the afternoon bore, politically correct, a positive pain.
So after thinking about it, I guess I am in favor of the afternoon nap, just so long as the bureaucrats don't get hold of it. Or maybe they already have.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
