The Heebie -Jeebies

My father had it; my mother did not. I inherited it and passed it on to one of my sons. The other son thinks we’re both crazy. It is a condition of restlessness; the feeling we have to move an arm or a leg. It affects 20% of older people and is related to the restless leg syndrome. There is no cure without difficult side-effects.

You might think it as a blessing giving you extra time to do the little chores of life, but it is not. The restlessness that keeps you up at night makes it impossible to read, watch TV, or write letters. I envy my wife as she sleeps like a baby. One rule we had in our younger days is that we need 8 hours of sleep every night: 16 hours of activity followed by 8 hours of sleep. It was our classmate Jerry Jerome who pointed out that was true only for when we were young: as we age, we need less and less sleep, so that at our age, now, we only need 4-5 hours of sleep; in fact, we can only tolerate 4-5 hours of sleep at a time. Perhaps counting all of the naps, we still get 8 hours, just not all at once. If we anticipate a big day coming up, we can go to bed early, but we just toss and turn for the extra hours.

The heebie-jeebies was just my father’s name for it. At other times, he called it the jim-jams. Same thing. The technical term is the Restless Leg Syndrome.

Rwalck@Verizon.net.