Thank you, Carl Grapentine, for years of morning memories

As I write this, the vision of an hourglass dances over my laptop. The sand flows down as the music plays on.

My time with Carl is running out.

At 10 a.m. last Friday, Carl Grapentine signed off for the last time as the morning host at WFMT-FM. Grapentine, 69, is stepping down after 22 years of hosting on Chicago’s classical music station

“It’s time,” he said in his retirement announcement.

Mornings are a time for new light, new starts, new hopes. For what seems like forever, my mornings have started with Carl, every weekday at 5:58 a.m.

His warm, mellifluous baritone, tinged with a hint of a chuckle, came with the sun. Always up, never saccharine, void of all pretention in what can be a pretentious genre.

Carl took me by the ear and through my morning with soothing, sassy, sometimes solemn selections of music and commentary.

He was there for the brushing and flossing, as I scanned the newsprint over a steaming mug, through headphones on the bus, streaming from the office computer. His music and commentary offered a respite from the world’s sturm und drang.

I am no classical music expert. Carl Grapentine made me a classical music lover.

His regular “Monday Morning Mozart” feature schooled me on my favorite composer. On Friday, one of the last offerings was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Vesperae Solennes de Confessore,” a magnificent sacred choral work that was new to me.

He melded the familiar with the esoteric, offering mini-lectures on the history and origins of the music.

Carl would play a lovely piece, then tell me about it. I would scribble notes. There are scraps of paper about beautiful music are all over my apartment, stuffed in drawers, files, and sofa cushions.

I first heard Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” with Carl. I find it supremely serene. The music snobs don’t. The composition “has become one of the most overused and abused pieces of insignificant music ever composed,” opined music writer Allen Kozinn in the New York Times.

If Pachelbel’s “Canon” is OK with Carl, it’s OK with me. A harpist played it at my wedding.

Carl was always there for my favorite holiday, playing selections like the Christmas Oratorio, by his favorite composer, J.S. Bach. Like a kid waiting for Santa, I listened for Carl’s annual presentation of “And Yet Another Partridge in a Pear Tree.”

The British musical farce is a “Cautionary Tale for Christmas Showing that it is Better to Give than to Receive,” written by Brian Sibley. It’s the story of Miss Cynthia Bracegirdle, a woman who is so harassed by the gift-giving of a suitor that she throws herself off a cliff.

Carl knows how to have fun. The son of a minister, he played the oboe as a music major at the University of Michigan. He sings in Grace Lutheran Church Choir in River Forest and lectures for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera. He loves baseball. On opening day, he always plays “Casey at the Bat,” narrated by James Earl Jones.

He will continue his other gig, as the “stadium voice” for the University of Michigan Marching Band and play-by-play game announcer in Ann Arbor.

On his final show, Carl offered modest “thank you’s” as the tributes rolled in. “Carl accomplishes something extraordinary on the radio,” WFMT Program Director David Polk told me Friday in an email. “He speaks individually to thousands of listeners simultaneously rather than making them sound like they’re one in a crowd.”

Thank you, Carl Grapentine, for my morning light.

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