Gum on the Bedstead

I should be sleeping, but in my desperation to keep from coughing my head off, I tried chewing gum to see if that would stop the tickle in my throat.  It worked for a little while until I remembered a scene from my childhood in which my mother had to cut a mat of hair and gum off my head because I went to bed with gum in my mouth. 

That image led to the next memory of the twin beds in the bedroom my younger brother, Pete, and I shared when we were kids.  The beds' head and footboards were brown turned wooden spindles that were fun to hold onto and do flip flop summersaults at the foot end between the beds.  There were always hard, sometimes sharp, petrified remains of the gum we couldn't separate from the headboard where we would park our gum for the night so we could continue chewing it in the morning.  Gum was hard to get, so we had to make it last.  Our doctor, Noall Z. Tanner, would give us a stick, but it wasn't worth a shot or nasty medicine to get a stick of gum.