My husband, Doc, can sleep anywhere and in any position, including standing up. Learning how to take maximum advantage of any opportunity to get some shut-eye was vital to his training as a liver transplant surgeon. I’ve been with him on subways all across Manhattan, so I’ve witnessed the phenomenon with my very own eyes. Doc would reach up, grab the overhead ring, and before the subway would arrive at the next stop, he was in dreamland. A vital part of my training, as an attorney, was to make sure he wasn’t mistaken for a heroin addict and tossed into the slammer without bail.

Airplanes work on Doc’s system like Ambien: Even before the flight takes off he is snoozing and will remain down for the count until touchdown. When we flew to Madras, India, it was, for me, like having a scarecrow as a companion. He was basically a prop; but instead of scaring off birds from the wheat fields, Doc’s job was to simply stay propped up while he slept. It was his snoring, during our many years of traveling together, which never failed to keep the other passengers at bay. Farmers ought to consider stuffing a tape recording of Doc’s snoring into their scarecrows. Birds may drop dead and fall out of the sky from the shock, but they won’t mess with the crops again.

When Anthony Burgess said, “Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone,” he didn’t realize that some spouses were trapped with their snorer on an international flight, and that short of parachuting out the exit door into the Taj Mahal, there was no escaping.

The Taj Mahal was designed to be an architectural wonder, but Doc has single-handedly turned snoring into an art form, particularly in the genre of Impressionism, Expressionism and Surrealism. Sometimes, he combines all three. That masterpiece I have entitled, “Hogs Gone to Slaughter.” It sounds something like this: “HEEE! YULP! EEE! AHGG! EEEKK! EEEKK!!” When Doc expresses this style of snoring, one has the impression that not only are the hogs being slaughtered, but they are in a state of surrealistic panic, as though they had been shown an order form from the McDonald’s chain, world-wide, for ten, trillion tons of bacon.

The alarm clock has just gone off, but I have been fully awake for hours and sitting up in bed while writing this column. Doc asks, “What’s the matter? Couldn’t you sleep?” “Not a wink,” I yawn. “Yes, you did.” “Well, how would you know, Cowboy?” “Because,” he says, “You were snoring.”

Shalom, y’all! Save the crops. Hang on to your snorer!