Sleep Talkin' Man by Karen Slavick-Lennard Page B

rushing around the kitchen, cooking for a dinner party. It wasn’t ideal, but Adam feared it would be his last opportunity to catch her alone. I was waiting just around the corner from the kitchen, outof immediate sight, but within earshot. Adam, in his awkwardness, expressed his intentions in ridiculously posh, outdated terms. Something like, “Patti, I’m sure that you’ve become aware of my intentions toward your daughter, and I would like your permission to have her hand in marriage.” It must have sounded fantastically British to my mother, like something out of a Jane Austen novel. She paused in her chopping, the knife hovering above the carrots. “Are you planning to treat her wonderfully and make her happy?” she asked. “Umm … yes? I am,” Adam awkwardly affirmed. “Oh,” she said, “well then, she’s all yours.” They shared a nice welcome-to-the-family hug—although, she still had the knife in her hand, so I guess it could have gone either way. As Mom returned to her chopping and Adam came around the corner from the kitchen, I saw him do a Rocky Balboa over-the-head double fist pump of triumph.
    Two down; one to go.
    In hindsight I can appreciate that I made an error with my brother. With my mom and dad, I waited until they met Adam before there wasany whisper of marriage. Adam is totally guileless and (in my totally unbiased opinion) utterly loveable, and anyone who saw us together instinctively knew that we belonged together. But in my brother’s case, I just called and told him that I was engaged. His lukewarm, skeptical reaction was not all that I would have hoped for.
    Put yourself in Jason’s place. Your sister tells you that she is going to marry a foreigner who only six weeks ago she saw for the first time since having her heart broken by him a decade and a half before. Add to this that you generally believe this sister to be impulsive and not always possessing perfect judgment, on top of which you’re an emotionally cautious kind of guy to begin with. You can imagine, then, that Jason was a little suspicious. I believe that, in short, my brother figured this was a guy gunning for a green card. “I’m sorry I can’t respond with the hoots of congratulations that you were probably hoping for,” he said. “That’s OK,” I replied, “you should respond however you feel.” I was confident, you see, that he would thaw the moment he met Adam.
    So, parents covered, I took Adam up to Boston. On our second night, we were out at a pool hall when my brother tricked me into giving him some man-to-man time with Adam. “Tamar wants to talk to you about something,” he said, handing me his cell phone with his girlfriend on the other end. I took it across the room, where I could hear better. A theatre director, Jason always knows how to inject just the right amount of drama to communicate his point effectively to his audience: He bent down, aimed carefully, took his shot, righted himself, planted the end of his cue firmly on the ground, and pinned Adam with an accusatory gaze. “So,” he said evenly, “What is it that you want from my sister?”
    The content of what followed is known only to Adam and Jason, but Adam must have given a convincing answer, because by the end of the weekend, they were delighted with each other. A year and a half later, it was Jason who officiated our wedding with that same sense of dramatic, but this time it was suffused with joy and love.
    Of course, at this point, none of us had met STM.
    Letter to Sleep Talkin’ Man
    I’m not just a sleep talker; I’m a sleep doer. Many a morning I’ve woken up to find my roommates snickering into their coffee, tears running down their faces, all too willing to regale me with stories of the crazy things I said or did the night before. I’m apparently a fount of information in my sleep. For example, I