To catch a thief

I remember when (oh-oh, here it comes) all of my kids were still at home. Since our family was large even by the standards of 25 years ago, there were shortages. There never seemed to be enough of some things to go around. Like dessert. Like lunch money. Like clean socks.

One shortage I was never able to overcome, was the pillow (yes, pillow) shortage. No matter how many pillows I bought, at bedtime there always seemed to be one less pillow than there were people in the house. Maybe the issue was not the quantity but the condition of the pillows. (Pancakes were in the same food group as parsnips.)

Whatever the precise problem, the result was that I lived with a whole family of pillow-snatchers. At almost any time of the day or night, a pillow switch was in progress in one bedroom or another.

You have probably heard of musical beds—well, who couldn’t keep their beds straight? It was the pillows, not the sleepers, that never seemed to stay in their beds.

The art of pillow-pilfering was nearly perfected in the Butterbean household, so just in case you get caught without a pillow one of these nights, I am passing these tips along for your comfort. But there are several ways to go about it, so pay attention.

In the light of day, the most successful way to get rid of a lumpy pillow and acquire one with some loft, is to sneak into the next bedroom and switch pillows and pillow cases. The victim thinks his pillow is still his until he lies down on it. This method delays the right-of-ownership dispute at least until bedtime, maybe even until the next morning, with any luck.

If planning ahead doesn’t reward the pillow plunderer with a soft pillow for the night, he or she can always wait until someone else goes to sleep and simply jerk his pillow from under his head and run. Sound sleepers don’t miss their pillows until they wake up next morning with stiff necks.

If the pillow is under the head of a light sleeper, the pirate has to snatch and then hit the deck until the victim gives up groping groggily around on the bed for the missing pillow and goes back to sleep.

Another trick of the trade works like this: you hide the pillow you really want and the one you have. Then if your big sister comes stomping out of her room demanding to know who took her pillow, you can plead innocence on the grounds that you don’t have a pillow either. She can just check your bed and see.

Pillow punks with less finesse simply wait until no one is looking and go to the next bed and swipe a pillow. They don’t even bother to cover their tracks. They do pick on people who come in late at night though. Those people aren’t about to raise a family ruckus when their arrival is timed dangerously close to curfew. Besides they could be too tired to care what they sleep on anyway.

I tried to insist that everyone leave everyone else’s pillows on their beds where they belonged so we could get by without holding justice court every night, but who was I? About all I could do was sit by clutching my pillow and hoping that all the thieves would reap their just rewards—the sooner the better.

I got to witness the justice-for-all precept come into play just once though. That was the time my teenaged daughter with the long shiny hair ca-me in late at night to a bed devoid of any pillow—lumpy, pancake or otherwise. She used the snatch-from-the-soundest sleeper method to obtain a pillow under cover of darkness.

What went around finally came around. The next morning she woke up with bubble gum in her hair.