No kings were murdered while making this

I slept on it, dreamed on it, closed my eyes and wished for Christmas morning on it. Passed down from my grandparents, it was one of a pair — both chestnut colored with short, rounded posts and sculpted head boards. My brother Jeff slept on the other bed, a narrow passageway between us.

Each night when we turned off the lights, we took turns using our knuckles on the headboards, gently pounding out TV show openings and commercial jingles. The Brady Bunch was always the easiest to guess, followed by The Jeffersons. By the time we got to Happy Days, my eyelids grew heavy and the sound of gentle pounding faded into darkness.

I spent long sick days on that bed, sniffling under the seasonal bed-in-a-bag ensemble I demanded from Mervyns. In the dark hours of the night when I thought Jeff was sleeping, I learned to kiss Kelly Artim in the bed, wrapping my arms around her just like in the movies.

Disturbed by the noises one night, Jeff propped himself on his elbow and peered through the dark, asking, “What the fuck are you doing?”

I hoped it was too dark for him to see, as I hurriedly pulled the stuffed bear’s fur from my tongue.

“Thleeping, why do you askth?”

I was mortified in that bed.

When Jeff got his own room, I got my own TV and Nintendo, which I thought was a fantastic trade, until the first night I turned out the lights and started gently knocking on the headboard, realizing the other bed had been moved out of the room and there was no one there to knock back. The room was deafeningly quiet. I felt lonely in that bed.

They say we spend a third of our lives sleeping, the “chief nourisher in life’s feast,” as Macbeth might say in one of those late-night commercial jingles, maybe for Sleep Train or Tempur-Pedic.

But I didn’t realize how many memories I had of my first “big boy” bed until I started restoring a hand-me-down bunk bed for Emmeline. First slept in by her grandmother so many centuries ago, the bed was brown and cracked, fashioned in a western theme, complete with a wagon train drawing on the headboard. It was the kind of bed you might find on Curly Washburn’s dude ranch and just as rickety.

Dana inherited the bed when she was the same age as Emme is now — 3 and a half. The bed is not high — the top bunk comes up to your shoulder. So I can see why her parents never installed a guardrail. And yet, at the same time, Dana was only 3 and a half, so I can see how she’d fallen out one night, crashing to the floor and splintering her collarbone on the carpet. When we took ownership of the bed, I found drill holes on the sides where her dad had constructed a makeshift guardrail after “the incident.”

Dana didn’t remember the western theme or the drawing of a wagon train on the headboard, so she wasn’t against sanding the whole thing down and painting it glossy white in accordance with Emme’s desire to have a “white and pink fairy rainbow bed.” We tried to find one of those in the stores, but quickly discovered that many children’s bunk beds sold for as much as $3,000.

No thank you.

Maybe it was the paint fumes — a noxious cloud of chemically white from the 50 spray cans I went through over the course of a month — but with each day of working on it, some new memory of my own childhood bed would emerge, and I’d grow impossibly excited about the idea that Emme would remember this new bed. Her crib and its toddler-sized conversion would probably be lost to the vagaries of time and memory, but this bed, she would sleep in it for years to come and would remember, maybe, what it was like to build a fort in the bottom bunk or curl up with dad to read a book on the top bunk. She would remember sleepovers, some friend or annoying younger sibling whispering from below. She would remember sick days and embarrassments. She would, I realized, spend an enormous chunk of her small life in this bed. Stripping the wood and putting on a high sheen, it made me glad to make her a special place, a place all her own.

As parents, we spend so much time focusing on the waking hours with our children, teaching, playing, instructing, trying to form memories and shape new people. But then you turn out the lights and let them go each night, handing them over to the “death of each day’s life.” And you realize that this is a time that shapes them equally — those quiet moments in the dark, when they are alone with their thoughts and the new longings and joys and memories that flicker behind their heavy lids.

More details over at the photo page today.