Are you awake yet?

Joe awakens, on purpose, at an hour when only thieves and garbage men are about. Before he is even out of bed, he is speaking in full, coherent sentences. Every morning he cheerfully inquires about my night: "How'd you sleep, hon?"

And every morning I answer, with some resentment, "Mffmfm," which roughly translates into "How do you know I'm done?"

Having to get up when you're still sleepy is bad enough, but dealing with a Perky Morning Person is enough to put one over the edge. If Joe were the eighth dwarf, he would be Cheerful. And I would be Cranky, at least for the first few hours of the day and whenever I am hungry.

One morning while he was working on his computer, he declared, "Isn't it amazing how clear your thinking is first thing in the morning?"

I looked around our study. "Are you talking to me?" I asked.

"You mean yours isn't?" he said with some surprise.

"Not unless by 'first thing in the morning' you mean 11 a.m."

He shook his head in obvious sympathy that my mental faculties were so slow to be pressed into service.

A certain member of my family is also a Perky Morning Person, and she always took great delight in tormenting me in the mornings when we both lived at home years ago. She told jokes. She sang cheery songs that she had learned at girls' camp, guaranteed to make one hop of out her bunk in the morning ("Good morning to you, you look kind of drowsy, in fact you look lousy"). A natural morning-hater, I came to really dread mornings.

One day I decided something needed to be done about this situation. And so I turned to the repository of wisdom through the ages, the dictionary. No, not the dictionary! The Bible. It has the solution to our every need, and boy was I in need of solutions.

Hmmm, I thought as I flipped through it. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn"? No... "A bekah for every man, that is, half a shekel , after the shekel of the sanctuary...." Not much help there. "The lips of a strange woman are as an honeycomb..." Not quite. "Sorrow is better than mirth"? Hmm, we were getting closer.

AH! There it was, in Proverbs 27:14. "He [or she, I translated] that blesseth his friend [or sister] with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him [or her]."

I tried it out on her one morning when my cup had runneth over with her cheeriness. She stared at me.

"What?...No, you made that up," she said, but she sounded unsure. With more glee than I had ever demonstrated before noon, I showed her the verse in the Bible.

"Solomon was the wisest person who ever lived," I reminder her, "and that's what he thought about Perky Morning Persons."

She was stunned. I kept the Bible open to the verse and displayed it, prominently, where she could see it every morning as a divine reminder. I never heard another cheerful morning song or joke from her.

Fortunately, at the time neither of us knew that this verse probably refers to someone taking advantage of someone, perhaps in a financial way. But even in that case, I am sure that the punishment involved would be far more lenient for someone who took such advantage at, say, 4 in the afternoon.

And just as fortunately for me, my sister did not happen to notice a little verse a few pages over that said, "How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard?"