When I Say 10 O'Clock

An early life marred by tardiness began with my delivery, in which I greatly inconvenienced my mother not only by being overdue, but by churlishly turning around at the last minute and presenting as a breech birth. Talk about rude and inconsiderate!

I could be wrong about this, but I think my mother held a grudge; the remainder of my childhood was notable for the number of events and deadlines I missed, not through my own lack of timeliness, but that of hers — after all, she was the one with the driver’s license and car and chauffeuring responsibilities, I was merely the cargo.

It’s easy for me to conjure up the images of field trip school buses already at the highway entrance when we pulled into the vacant elementary lot, or the ferry pulling away from the dock on the voyage to the island day camp, or the remnants of cake on the table when we finally arrived at the birthday party, with my gift unwrapped and still in the shop bag.

I could cite a hundred other examples, but the absolute nadir was when I was ten and my cat Minnie died from eating rat poison, and the vet said we were just a little outside of the window when she might have been saved. I had been sitting on the front stoop of our house with her in a box for the better part of two hours while my mother “got organized”. That one was hard.

Another hard one was when my mother and my little brother and I flew to Hawaii to meet my father on his R&R respite from fighting in Viet Nam. It’s weird to think of a vacation break from war, but that’s what this essentially was. When it was time to drive to the air base to greet my father, my mother could not locate the keys to the rental car. When it became clear that the keys were actually, irretrievably lost, we had to go to the car rental place down the street from the hotel and get a replacement car since they did not have a duplicate key. This whole adventure took about an hour and then we had the drive to the airbase, so we ended up being close to two hours late from the plane’s arrival time.

My father was sitting by himself at a table in the hangar among all the happy re-united families when we finally got there. I had a shock of recognition when I first glimpsed him- he had the same expression of resignation, annoyance and frustration that was one of my commonplace miens. The joy of reunion washed away the irritation of delay, but I knew from my own experience that this would be one that might be forgiven, but not shortly forgotten.

I am writing this to show how incredibly disruptive and yes, even traumatic, habitual lateness and tardiness can be to a child or in any family or social dynamic. Once my parents made the inevitable decision to divorce, my brother and I made the just as inevitable decision to live with my father; it seemed as simple as choosing order over chaos.

When I was a teenager and was given my weeknight curfew of ten o’clock from returning from a girlfriend’s house on a school night, my father would say, “I want you home by ten o’clock. Not two minutes after ten, not ten minutes after ten, but ten. Do you understand?”

And I would hug him and say, “Yes I understand.” And I would be home by ten.

As an adult, one lingering side effect of my childhood is that I am prompt. It has stood me in good stead in both my personal and professional life. My husband learned early on that the one thing that stressed me out beyond and above anything else was being late. I don’t think he quite realizes that the originating source behind the toe-tapping and anxious sighs is a tableau of school bus exhaust, ferryboat wakes and boxes of dead kittens, he just knows that being on time makes me happy and being late makes me unhappy. So there you have it.

This is how the wake looks when you're on the boat