March 25, 1987
I don’t know what we were thinking of, I guess we don’t go out for dinner enough to know that Saturday evening is not the best time to get served in a hurry. Anyway there we were standing in line at the restaurant along with what appeared to be everyone else in town.
It didn’t take too long for my boys to start with the comments. Typical teenagers, they began to see ways to gain something from the experience. “Next time let’s bring our candy bars (fund raisers for the band) and sell them to everyone in line,” was the first idea. “We could rent ourselves out to save places in line,” was the next one.
From there we moved on to valet parking and renting stools to sit on. Not only did my boys have something to think about while waiting but they also kept the three little kids behind us amused for fifteen minutes.
It seems we spend a great deal of our lives waiting. We start our waiting to get into this world (I thought my first born would never arrive), and continue to stand in line for almost everything. So it’s a good idea to come up with things to do while we bide our time.
Now if your are the type to plan ahead, you carry a book, your knitting, etc. with you. If your lifestyle is more like mine you have to improvise.
I have counted the flowers in the wallpaper, the cars passing a window and the number of customers who enter a building. I have also held conversations with some fascinating people I had never seen before and have never seen since.
I think I learned some of these activities when I was a young child and attended church and other meetings with my parents. In those days nobody thought anything of asking their child to sit through an hour long service. So I leaned to play cat in the cradle with a piece of string, to roll my father’s handkerchief into babies in a swing and to fold paper into interesting shapes.
Perhaps someone should compile all these ideas into a small booklet. They could sell them to the people standing in line. (Maybe my sons would help out while they sell their candy bars!)
GCB