It's not the mornings - it's the alarm clocks

I can't deny it. My son, Jim, pegged me pretty well in his "Last Word" submission last week ("So not a morning person").

I do get up absurdly early. I do camp out at Starbucks, so much so that I'm the de facto equivalent of a Wal-Mart greeter for the regular coffee fiends who follow. I like my Beatles and Rockports and T-shirts and sports -- although honesty compels me to report that my lovely wife of 34 years can lay down the law on the latter.

But he's entirely wrong about the morning. It is without question the best part of the day - but only as long as one doesn't have to do battle with his apparent nemesis: the alarm clock.

There was a time when I shared his distaste for that irritating little Klaxon. For 30 years I was a pilot - Air Force and Delta - and had to submit myself to it as a serf to his king. With the constant fluctuation of diurnal cycles, 24-hour standby assignments and "midnight rockets" flown through the wee hours, I'd order a wake-up call and set two additional alarms to ensure making my flights.

But I retired from that life a few years back and traded it for a part-time gig as an adjunct professor at NKU. Even with my preferred early morning classes, I've found the alarm is joyously superfluous.

My body found its own admittedly peculiar groove: Wake up at 4 a.m.; beat down the door at Starbucks at 5:30 a.m.; teach for a few hours; take frequent, non-REM naps as required; and hit the sack at 8 or 9 p.m.

I used to be troubled about missing some good TV, but with the advent of the greatest invention mankind has ever known -- the digital video recorder -- I can watch shows at my convenience. Say, after one of my naps.

There's nothing to match the gradual retreat of a harvest moon as it's supplanted by the flash of dawn. No pleasure can match that early a.m. coffee coupled with the leisurely scrutiny of a real newspaper spread across one's lap. And to have all that without need for the blaring box of pain on the nightstand? Heaven on earth.

So hang in there, Jim. Someday you, too, may get to share my glorious celebration of Eos. Near as I can calculate, you only have about another 40 years of smacking that clock around ...

Sleep tight!

Doug Wolff likes to greet the goddess of dawn at his home in Mount Washington. Now that he has permanently silenced his alarm clock, he's working on tuning out jet noise at Lunken, ambulances screaming up Beechmont and his yappy Jack Russell Terrier.