Of the many marvelous melodies that Leroy Anderson wrote, my favorite has always been "The Syncopated Clock. " That's the one (remember) that served as the theme music for "The Late Show" on TV, and as a teenager 1 must have heard it literally hundreds of times while I was staying up watching those movies till three o'clock in the morning. Then, some eight hours later, when I would stagger out of my room, my father (who had already put in a good half-day's work) would shake his head sadly in my mother's direction. How had he managed to produce such a lazy son?
But in fact, I was not lazy. The reality was, and is, that my own clock happens to be syncopated-off-beat to the tune of approximately four hours. One of my earliest memories is of my mother putting me to bed at the usual eight-thirty, and then finding me lying there with my eyes wide open on three subsequent bed-checks during the evening. "Why are you still awake?" she finally demanded to know, and all I could tell her was that I just plain wasn't sleepy. I certainly was the next morning, though.
This pattern persisted through my teen years, and my life itself developed into a late show of sorts. Homework that had seemed impossible earlier in the day was a piece of cake during the dark hours between 11 and 3. Whole books got read then; letters and little stories were written. There was just no point in trying to sleep: even on those rare occasions when I did manage to conk out by 11 and sleep for eight hours, I still spent most of the entire next morning in a fog. Then, a little before noon it was as though a curtain lifted-just like that. I could count on it.
Medical training was more of the same. No problem staying up the night, but the first gray light in the sky invariably brought drawing aches to my calves, gnawing pains to my epigastrium, and a feeling that my eyeballs were being pushed out of their sockets from within. My favorite rotation was one during my first year of obstetrics residency, when for one week out of every three I covered Labor and Delivery from 6 PM to 8 AM. And at 8 I was free to sleep through ten full hours of daylight.