Pa-la-PONG!

I sleep with my room door opened. My mom came in one morning (or afternoon, or dinnertime), as I was waking up, and informed me that I was making weird noises in my sleep.

"This reminds me of when you were young," she said. "One day, you just decided to keep saying pa-la-PONG! over and over again. We couldn't get you to stop, nor figure out what you were trying to tell us."

I'd never heard this story before.

"It was a long time afterwards, when we'd almost forgotten about it, that we noticed the ladder in the wash area, and remembered how it fell some time ago when you were playing nearby. Turns out you were making the noise of the falling ladder... pa-la-PONG!," she chuckled. "The things you children did."

"The point?" I enquired sleepily, still stretching under the covers.

"You were making that noise in your sleep."

It's hard to believe that the woman who can remember this from almost 20 years ago is the same woman who pops her head in my room every evening, without fail, to ask me: "Eh, do you know where my glasses are? I forgot where I left them again."