Bedside Tables

The bedside table-top is a window into what we value enough to keep it close to us while we sleep or use in the those final moments before dozing off. Over the years, in our society, this collection has changed dramatically for most of us.

My grandmother had a clock that was shaped like a ship’s wheel and it was made of brass (or fake brass more likely). It was electric. This clock stopped when she died in 1957. Back then clocks did things like that! She had a lamp too – the kind made out of ceramic with a shade. She had a glass for her teeth to soak overnight. She had a radio at her bedside – nothing fancy, just a radio with no clock. She usually had a copy of a ladies’ magazine like Better Homes and Gardens.

My grandfather loved stories about the old West and he generally had one going, resting on his bedside table beside his lamp. He had his teeth glass as well. He loved cigars, but having been told by his doctor that he could no longer smoke them, he chewed them. There was a Muriel cigar resting in an ashtray on his bedside table.

My mother had a clock radio which I think she probably got in about 1950. It was Motorola and made out of Bakelite. Each night she put it on “automatic” and fell asleep to the background sounds of “The People Speak,” a call-in radio program. She had a bean bag ashtray and copy of whatever she reading, which was typically either a book she for her literary club, a detective magazine or the American Heritage magazine or National Geographic –demonstrating the diversity of her interests. Of course, she had a bedside lamp.

My father also had an ashtray, a lamp, a flashlight in case the power went off, and a stack of magazines and books he was reading. He was an avid reader, but his favorites were Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and US News and World Report.

When I was a child, I just had a reading lamp and my book du jour – which was usually a Bobbsey Twins adventure on Lake Minnetonka. I usually had a glass of milk before going to sleep, so I would leave the empty glass for pick up by my long suffering mother in the a.m.

When I became a teenager, I got my own clock radio and bigger and better bedside lamp. I used to listen late at night to the 50,000 watt rock stations from Atlanta, Nashville and New Orleans. Not wanting to rent another instrument from the phone company, my Dad indulged me with my own phone from his collection of old phones. I ended up with a phone from the 1930s that my mother gold-leafed. My girlfriends thought it was pretty odd, but I had a phone of my own and if you were a teenager in 1960, that was a big deal!

When I was a young married adult, the radio, clock and light got combined into one compact instrument. I opted for a “regular” phone in beige, although at the time the princess phone was preferred by most. I always found the princess phone too lightweight and easy to pull off the table, though admitted smaller. Of course, I still had the ashtray because smoking had entrenched itself into my life. A few years later, however, the ashtray was gone, as was the smoking addiction.

When we built a new house in 1992, we mounted high –intensity lights on each side of our king-sized bed. We bought new matching end tables and we each had our digital clock radio and phone. There was room for a book and glasses. Somewhere along the way, my vision had begun to fail and if I wanted to read, glasses became necessary. Even with glasses, I found paperbacks hard to read, so I usually had a magazine or hardbound book.

Today, my bedside table has a digital clock radio that has a slot on the top for the previous generation of iPhone. It is hard to set, so it says an hour earlier than it really is. I never listen to it; it won’t work with he phone I bought last May, and it has the wrong time. Upon reflection, I think it should be retired! Besides I need the room on the table. I have run out of electric outlets beside the bed, so I am running a couple of cords from around the corner, so the bedside table has various small white wires going in different directions. There is the controller for the electric blanket, which can be removed now that the electric blanket has been stashed away for the summer. There is, of course, my iPhone 4, plugged into its white cable and its new BIG brother the iPad 3 and its cable. And the iPad is sitting on top of the poor Kindle in its leather case with built- in pop-up light.

I guess today I should re-organize my bedside table, removing the clock radio and the electric blanket controller. And sadly, I guess I should retire the Kindle by downloading its books onto the iPad and try to find the Kindle a good home. If I do that, I should have enough outlets beside the bed and won’t have to run any wires around the corner. AND, the book (yes, I am reading a book) will fit on the bedside table and no longer have to live on the dresser top. Change is hard, as is growing old – but thank goodness, I still have my teeth in my mouth and not in a glass! There is just so much that will fit on a bedside table!