Rite of the Alarm Clock

There can be few sounds more beautiful than the peel of church bells on Sunday mornings. How I love lending weekend's languorous ear to their beseeching chimes, luxuriating in the knowledge that I need not leave the house until my sousaphone class begins at noon. Similarly, I remember waking to the insistent song of the muezzin one morning in Marrakesh. I punched his forehead many times but never found the "snooze" button. And when I stayed at a Tibetan monastery some years ago, a monk who looked as though he was made of old shoe leather tried to rouse me with an enigmatic whisper: "Buddha brushes the teeth of the caterpillar with the wings of the of the butterfly." Not a particularly enlightened way to wake up, if you ask me, and the lazy swine hadn't even shined the shoes I'd left outside the door overnight. Frankly, if I was in charge of fabricating religious timetables, I would devise a call to worship more likely to tease disciples from their scripture-haunted slumbers: "Coffee's up!" or "Brethren, there are donuts" are two phrases that spring immediately to mind.