being late

If I'm on a plane or a bus and I see that we're running late, I shrug my shoulders. Nothing I can do about it. It will be as it will be.

But if I'm driving or walking, I struggle and I fret. I'm in control, after all. If I'm even later than late, it's my fault.

I have an 8 o'clock morning appointment. Stupid, right? Who makes such early appointments when their day follows no schedule and can easily accommodate a later time? Worse: today is the day of snow. The kind that grinds rush hour traffic to a halt. A fifteen minute drive turns into a forty-five minute trip and so I am late and panting and as anxious as I knew myself to be in the years that I rushed to be at work on time.

There is no lesson here (except maybe to pay more attention to weather forecasts). But I remembered the agony of rushing. And again I felt the privilege of retirement.


Breakfast was (therefore) late. Nearly noon by the time I returned for it.





And after? Well, I needed to go back to tapes I had of my father's recollections of his childhood. He had insisted on creating this record five years ago and now, nearly a year after his death, I finally play them again. No, not an easy task. But each time I listen to my parents, I hear something new, even if it is a repeat of a known to me story. So I listen. For several hours. Until Ed comes up from the sheep shed and suggests we go on a brief shopping expedition to Walmart. (Always fun exactly because it is so terribly not fun.)

The snow flurries pick up again and the winds howl.


 


It is a good night to come back to the farmhouse to a hot pot of homemade chili.