Those of you who are often awake in the middle of the night will understand this story and empathize. Others may simply be amused. Either way, it’s a good story.

On Wednesday night I woke at about 2:30 AM as I often do, and got up to play the New York Times word games and catch up on the news from various sources. I know that there is no point in tossing and turning in bed because once I am awake I stay awake for quite a while. After about three hours, I went back to bed and went through my normal going-back-to-sleep routine. It involves trying to focus on my breathing by counting in for four, out for four, then hold for four. It usually works, but on that night I couldn’t stop my mind wandering as I dozed off.

When my mind wanders in the night it can pull out things from my memory that go back a long way, and the older I get the worse my memory gets. So these late-night recollections can be quite surprising and totally unrelated to anything that is going on in my daytime.

This particular memory was so unusual that it woke me up again. I was remembering the words to She Wears Red Feathers as sung by Guy Mitchell back in 1953. I was born in 1949, so this is a memory of a song I must have heard on the BBC radio when I was a small child. As I went through the song, though, I couldn’t remember all the lyrics and it bothered me enough that I got up to check them online.

When I typed the song title into the search bar it brought up a YouTube video and a link to a website called LyricFind. When I checked the lyrics, I saw right away that they were not completely correct. They had the fourth line of the second verse as “Each night of music calls, rather lost I seem” but I remembered it as “Each night at music halls, travelogues I see.”

Of course, I could not go back to bed knowing that they had this so wrong, and I just had to write and let them know. They emailed to thank me, but as yet I don’t see a correction. Maybe they are checking out the rest of the song first, or maybe they just went back to bed. If so, I hope they got more sleep than I did! I did eventually get another couple of hours’ sleep, but that darned song is still running through my mind.