Last week the service shop called the house to say the car was ready. It was 3:15 in the afternoon and my son answered the phone and promptly told them “Dad can’t come to the phone, he’s napping”.

When I went down to pick up the car, I was met with uproarious laughter. “Sorry we interrupted your nap, har har har“.

Truth is, the last laugh may rest with me, at least according to a new study that pretty much proves us nappers have something going for us…

In a study released Monday, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and in Athens reported that people who took regular 30-minute naps were 37 percent less likely to die of heart disease over a six-year period than those who never napped. The scientists tracked more than 23,000 Greek adults, finding that the benefits of napping were most pronounced for working men. (from the Boston Globe, via the International Herald Tribune)

I come from a long line of nappers.  On the Ouimet side of the family, napping is considered an art and is given its proper due.  As a kid, you learned early and quickly to tip-toe around the sleeping elders in their La-z-Boys, carefully watching ‘the feet’ for fear of movement, the tell-tale sign that a precious nap had been interrupted.

There’s no recliner in our home, but who needs it. All those years of flying 150,000 miles a year proved a powerful training ground for getting shut-eye in all the wrong places.  Call it modern nap-evolution, but I can catch zzz’s pretty much anywhere.

And who knew, I’m so much the healthier for it.