The Prince and the Pea
You all know the story of the princess and the pea. It’s about this young princess that is so very delicate that she must be given a bed that has an extra soft mattress in order to be able to sleep at night. She tells this to her prince and while he wants to believe she is a real princess, his queen mother wants proof so she decides to put one over on the princess. She places a pea underneath a stack of twenty mattresses, expecting her not to notice and thereby impune her heritage. The next morning the princess rises and when asked how she slept she says that she had an uncomfortable night, tossing and turning and ending up bruised and battered by the lumpiness of her mattress. This proved to one and all that she was, indeed, the real princess for whom the prince had been searching. According to Hans Christian Anderson, they lived happily ever after.
But Anderson, in his older age had to rewrite the story to include a new last chapter. After many years of happiness together, the prince and princess suddenly had a problem. The prince, when he turned forty, started to snore and it began depriving the aging princess of the beauty sleep she needed to become queen. The prince tried to solve this problem by gradually stacking up extra mattresses in what can only be characterized as an Elephant Man fashion whereby his head was elevated in order to keep his throat airway open at night. This did the trick for a while, as it stopped the snoring and arrested the development of sleep apnea, which would have gradually turned the sleepless prince into a wicked ogre. Finally the prince heard of a new invention in the land called a CPAP machine. He commandeered one such device and strapped it to his head at bedtime. Lo and behold, it solved his sleep apnea and snoring and he could dismantle the stack of mattresses and put them back into storage from whence they had come.
One day, when the prince was quickly approaching the age of seventy, he awoke with a stabbing pain in his shoulder. You see, he had learned that it is best for effectiveness of the device, to sleep on his side to keep the CPAP working at its best. This had been fine for a while, but obviously it had taken its toll on the poor prince’s left rotator cuff and rendered his shoulder sore. Not to worry, the prince started bringing out extra mattresses to make the bed softer on top so as to lessen the pressure on his troubled shoulder. He even went so far as to buy a top-of-the-line pillow-top mattress to add to his comfort. This worked well for him and he got enough solid sleep that he remained a goodly prince to his people and to his delicate and wonderful princess.
Then, on day, the prince decided that he and his princess needed to go on a trip to visit his oldest son, the prince-in-waiting, who had moved with his bride (princess princess) down to the Delaware Shore. This was a lovely land and the prince and princess enjoyed their travel to this new and wondrous land of seaside enchantment. They found a lovely, but not inexpensive, inn and secured lodging for the night. They had arrived only to find that the innkeeper had sold all the rooms with king beds to other visiting kings and queens (the area around Rehoboth Beach was particularly populated and enjoyed by many queens). That left only queen beds to be had, so the prince and princess took the room with the smaller bed since the inn was otherwise very commodious and to their liking.
The prince grew weary after an evening of merriment with his son and daughter-in-law, the pretenders to his throne. As he retired for the night on his smaller-than-normal queen-sized bed, he noted its softness and thought that along with his traveling CPAP, he would be able to get a good night’s sleep. But that was not meant to be. He spent the long warm summer evening, laden with the humidity that often inhabits the coastal areas along the mid-Atlantic coastline. That humidity had the added affect of seeping into the bones of aged travelers and wrecking havoc with the cartilaginous padding between the major joints, rendering them sore and more creaky than was their norm. Combined with a deceptively soft bed, which was causing the prince great discomfort to his spinal column, the poor prince spent a sleepless night alternating between self-applied shoulder massage and a greater-than-prescribed clinical dosage of both Advil PM and Extra Strength Tylenol. He arose after six hours of this Torquemada-like torture feeling badly bruised and beaten, not to mention decidedly sleep-deprived.
It was too early for his princess to be expected to arise since this princess, getting longer of tooth year-by-year, needed all her beauty sleep. She had her own aches and pains of aging that needed the recuperative soothing of sound sleep to dampen. The prince decided to let his princess sleep and chose to sit himself on the sunrise-dappled veranda outside their Eastward-facing window. The dulcet sounds of morning wafted across the low-tide inlet adjacent to the inn. The prince could hear the birds chirping as they scurried about to gather their morning quotient of worms and seeds. He could hear the cicadas humming harmony in the background as the seashore slowly arose from its slumber to another perfect, if slightly humid, summers day. It was a fine place for the prince to shake off his morning stiffness, exacerbated by his relatively sleepless night of tossing and turning in the over-soft bed. The prince was a man of strong heart with a conviction to grin and bear it when it came to physical tiredness. He decided then and there to muscle through the morning and prepare to meet his son and daughter-in-law who would be joining the prince and princess for breakfast at a nearby breakfast watering hole named Eggscelent.
The prince noted that the other feature of the lesser queen-sized bed room they has rented for the night was that it did not have the direct water view that the king-sized rooms presumably enjoyed. His partial view of the marina and inlet moorings was enough to make him feel that he was on the seashore, but it was three degrees off top dead center of the full beach experience that he had expected with his $350 per night stay. Not to worry, the prince and princess were leaving that morning anyway after their planned breakfast with the heir to his throne. The prince just hoped he could stay alert and wakeful enough to drive safely the 340 miles to get himself back to his homeward bound king-sized bed. He reckoned that a few high-octane caffeinated Diet Cokes would do that trick for him.
Just then, he glanced back into the room and saw the princess starting to arise from her comfortable night’s sleep. He noted that she had not seen him sitting on the balcony. She proceeded to stealthily go to his side of the bed and reach under the mattress for something and place it in her satchel. When she went into the adjoining bathroom to take her morning ablutions, he snuck back into the room and across to her satchel. He was curious what she had placed therein. To his surprise it was a pea, the same pea that had been placed under her mattresses years ago. It seems that the princess had never completely gotten over being subjected to a worthiness test when that same pea had been placed under her mattresses. It was at that point that the prince decided that he was too old for this shit and would solve the problem by simply not traveling anymore and that he would be certain to check for errant peas under his bed forevermore.