My memory foam pillow remembers everything. It sees too much.
Maybe my sleep has been less sound recently, and maybe it’s the pillow’s fault. That’s what I thought when I read an article on bed pillows filled with buckwheat hulls, instead of closed-cell foam, feathers and polyester fluff. Before the special foam pillow bought over two years ago, I came to prefer a “better” (Sears memorably used to sell similar items in good, better and best categories) polyester pillow, ideally bought every year for under $10. Inspired this week by The Wall Street Journal story, I’ve Googled up buckwheat pillows and placed an order online.
Disturbed sleep may not be the fault of the pillow but the stresses of the day. I can’t blame it on the bedroom, a healthy mix of Hers and His. Most of the wall decorations are hers. Still left are two of my singleton posters, Pier 1 (back when it was closer to Spenser Gifts than Crate & Barrel) reproductions of vague nudes by Matisse and Picasso. There’s one wedding photo and the ketubah (Jewish wedding certificate) I calligraphed. The bedclothes are her choice. No pink thankfully, rather, soothing earth tones. The furniture for the past five years was inherited from my mom; it’s 1950s, beautiful but mainly we kept it for its practicality. The dresser is large, and My Beloved uses it. The headboard is full of cabinets, draws and shelves. My dresser remains a rolling plastic cart that fits precisely in my closet.
The master bedrooms of others can be such a window. Those of couples older than us generally are comfortable like ours. Family photos and sensible furniture. Sentiment may define the decorations. Whatever it is, it’s rarely decor.
Younger couples reflect the wife’s impulses, it appears. Many are so frilly I feel like I fell into a J.C. Penney catalog. Window and bed treatments define them, not the other way around. I try to understand the husband, how he can walk in the bedroom with his swagger intact. He can’t. Guys with this situation never complain. It is very important to a husband that the bedroom makes his wife happy.
One could suspect that the bedrooms of single women therefore would have a more pronounced femininity but, in my experience, that is rare. The bedrooms of unattached women demonstrate their personality but generally they’re very spare, with most pictures and furnishings placed in the living room. It’s not that I spend much time in women’s bedrooms — really — but the bed is where the coats go at parties, and without peaking under the bed, I do make observations. Single women only have time to make a bed by smoothing out the comforter, while lots of set-up women make dusting and vacuuming bedskirts and pillow shams, valances and window scarves, a priority.
Bachelors’ quarters are as spare as their living rooms. Ideally, guys would have the color sense and showmanship shown in the paneled flat of the dashing fellow played by Ewan McGregor in the 2003 movie Down with Love (one of my favorite comedies of the decade, too clever and as light as a stray blonde hair on your tweed coat). My rooms when I was single were as sparse as my friends, and these days that seems not to have changed with men. A mattress defines the bedroom and the sofa the living room.
Few people ever rave about their pillows. They give them points for being better than the ones of most motels they’ve stayed in, but that’s it.
My memory-foam simply may have forgotten the shape of my head. Yet it seems fresh even now. Where that special plastic works well is in the car. In my hatchback I place at my lower back a memory foam chair pillow from Office Depot, where I found the best price and quality. Still on nights like last night, when it’s 12:15 a.m. and 16 degrees, the foam feels like a flagstone set on its edge. it is that hard. The pillow warms quickly, but in the winter it won’t soften in my 20-minute drive home. It’s a keeper, though, because my spine is happy.
As a bed pillow, closed-cell foam is much heavier than batting and won’t settle into batting’s dreaded lumps. Buckwheat may well be better. Perhaps going back to batting pillows, a new one every year, is the right way to go if it isn’t.
Maybe I should pull an old pillowcase over this Sleep Innovations pillow and cast it into Beaver Lake, as if to drown it. It is foam, though, so it will just float off.
