Waiting

I don’t like waiting for anything.

Let me step into a nice restaurant and the hostess tell me there’s a 30-minute wait, watch me spin around and march right back out. There’s not that much hunger in the world for me to wait for a seating. One exception: Cracker Barrel Country Style Restaurant. The waiting is inevitable, the location too out of the way, the browsing too inviting, and the food too good.

Show me a store’s 10-person line to a cashier, I show them that re-stocking my selections is their end result. One exception: Costco – My Most Favorite Store In The World. The waiting is inevitable, the location too out of the way, the browsing too inviting, and the pricing too good.

Tell me you’re going to meet me at 6:15 and don’t show up until 6:20, I’m wondering why you couldn’t have arrived at 6:10. No exceptions.

Living in New York, you’d think I’d be use to it. No way you don’t wait somewhere, somehow, for some thing. My cousin – he who thinks much of what I say or do is prime meat for one of his joking comments – says I’m getting cranky because I’ve gotten old. (It’s most definite I will get him back for that!) But it’s not true, Cuz. You’re wrong. Waiting has annoyed me most, if not all, my life. And I realize when the annoyance began – when I was a child. What neurosis doesn’t begin with . . . Mother?

From pre-school age until I was about ten or eleven, occasionally my mother awakened us kids in the chill of a pre-dawn summer morning. Sent to the living room, we’d find play outfits laid out on the sofa. Except for our shoes, everything was brand new: shorts, tops, socks, underwear, sweaters, and, for our hair, colorful ribbons or barrettes still pinned to the card.

My mother didn’t inform us when she purchased the Eastern Star or St. Philips Episcopal Church fundraising tickets for the day-long getaways: chartered bus rides from our city projects to foreign locales – usually the picnic grounds of Bear Mountain, Indian Point, or Hechster State Park. Smart lady. She didn’t abuse herself with our demands for responses – When’re we going? What time do we get there? Who’s going with us? What’s there? What can we do there? How far away is Saturday? Is Saturday tomorrow? When do we leave? How long does it take? How long ’re we staying? Can I wear my new blouse? What’re we eating? Can we have baloney, and boiled ham, and fried chicken, and peaches, and grape Kool-Aid? – so she told us nothing.

Once attired in our publicly-acceptable best – new clothes, scalps greased and hot-combed hair banged, pigtailed or ponytailed, Vaseline smoothed over face and limbs (the globby excess toweled off) – we ventured out into the still pre-dawn streets. We would have to travel to where the coach buses met.

For whatever reason, the meeting place was never on our side of Brooklyn. That meant we rode public transportation to the location. That meant we’d have to wait for the first bus or train to take us to a transfer point where we’d have to then wait for the second bus or train.

Finally, we’d arrive. The first ones to arrive. In my whole childhood, I fail to remember not being the first ones to arrive. I don’t know what it was with my Mother that we always had to be the first. We asked her; she ignored us.

A slip of light blue-grey sky peeked through the diminishing night by the time we reached the designated street corner. Deserted. No other human waiting. The first slanted rays of sunlight striped the sidewalk curb by the time a middle-aged Eastern Star sister or church member ambled up, greeting us with a wan smile. No children to play with, no help to whittle away the waiting time. No, they were probably still at home, warm and snug in their beds. We, instead, were hunched up hugging ourselves in lightweight sweaters, chilled breezes nipping at our knees, sitting our narrow behinds on the picnic box cooler or the multi-gallon thermos of Kool-Aid. We didn’t dare sit on the curbside. That would dirty our “play” clothes.

As the sun spread to more of the sidewalk, we waited in its welcomed warmth and watched people dribble in along with kids we were, for the moment, too shy to play with (and anyway, we still had to keep our “play” clothes clean). Eventually, mutterings would be heard that the buses were late. Energetic pre-cellphone discussions educated the organizer on what street corner could be found a working pay phone. Was it too soon to complain to the bus company?

At length, the buses appeared – the drivers giving flimsy excuses or no apologies at all – and we’d climb aboard. We’d each scramble into a soft, fabric covered seat that reclined with a doubled-up thumbs push of a button (an action for which our mother promised to kill us if we tried) – and waited some more. The organizer had to count heads again. She’d already done this several times before the late buses arrived.

Invariably, just as the buses began pulling away, more people ran up, waving their bus-stopping arms and shouting at us to – what else – wait. They appeared astonished/perturbed that we almost left without them. After all, didn’t they pay their good, hard-earned money for tickets. It seemed everyone but my mother knew they were permitted to be late – others waited. Even the bus drivers knew they could be late. They would however remind/warn/threaten everyone that the buses departed the picnic grounds no later than the scheduled time – On Time. No problem for the already identified.

At long last, the bus drove off to a hearty applause from the grownups and from us kids a pressure-released “Yaaaaaaaay.” Then all we had to do to get to our destination was to . . . wait. (“Are we there yet?”)

So, no, I don’t like waiting. I’ve been conditioned to a low tolerance for it. I’m not getting old and crabby. I was young and scrappy when I learned to dislike waiting.

So there it is, Cuz. You’re wrong. Again.