Always on time
I’ve got plenty of faults. Definitely! But one source of personal pride is that I’m never late. Never!
That doesn’t mean that the plane I’m flying on is always on time or the various appointments that I plan, but which are contingent on someone else, are always “bidyuk,” — precisely punctual. It does mean that when I’m in control, I’m prompt and according to schedule. I can’t help it. I come from a family just like that. When we make a date or a reservation, say, in a restaurant, it’s merely a matter of who will be earliest, never who will be latest. It’s a fight for the first!
Many years ago, Mom solved the annual Thanksgiving Day quandary. No matter what time the meal was scheduled for, my aunt and uncle, Bessie and Charlie, were going to be an hour late.
Mom patchkaed in the kitchen for days and hours to make the only American holiday we ever celebrated stylishly festive and beautiful. She had learned to make food look professionally plated from her mother, who ran the Bauman House hotel and became accustomed to feeding hordes. Nothing was just thrown on a plate. Every last drop of chopped liver, for example, was an artistic creation, shaped to perfection with savory fried onions heaped atop, artfully displayed with some crumbled hardboiled egg yolks adding vibrancy to the color, supplemented by ruby ripe red tomatoes and deep green crisp lettuce. Maybe a radish added to the array, which became a work of art, almost too pretty to eat, but consumed with gusto nonetheless.
The entire meal followed suit with every delicious item always absolutely perfect, appetizing, appealing, and sumptuous. Each course was followed by another example of Mom’s great talent in preparing a lavish meal, made enticing by the extra details that were always included.
Mostly this work was followed by the anguish of watching the lettuce wilt or the turkey drying out or any other similarly thoughtless impediments to the production’s infallibility, caused by awaiting the late-arriving guests. Pop, Mom’s (and Charlie’s) father, who lived with us, a renowned, world-class grumbler, and frequent critic, annually would instruct us to start without the latecomers, to which he would add an English profanity, uttered in contempt, with his pronounced Yiddish accent, obviously implying that the failure to arrive on time was due to his daughter-in-law’s casual and selfish approach to punctuality, rather than any deficit of his perfect son, the dentist.
Yet it was unthinkable to commemorate the beautiful holiday without our aunt, uncle, and two cousins. Finally, Mom came up with the solution, so perfectly simple that it was uncanny to think none of us had ever entertained the idea in previous years. It required one simple and painless little white lie. We would give all our other guests a time for the festive meal but we would give the always tardy a somewhat different schedule. They would be told we were convening one hour before we actually planned to serve dinner. That gave them plenty of time to flaunt their late arrival with their always grand entrance, without doing damage to Mom’s meal.
That plan worked well except for one strange occasion, several years after its implementation. Foiled again were we as they arrived at the new false time, right on time. They complained bitterly about everyone else who was supposedly late. You can’t always win!
But back to me. I never had tolerance for those who kept me waiting. During my many years of working as a real estate broker, I especially remember a prospective buyer named Cindy, a young, pretty, Jewish woman who had no regard for punctuality. We would meet at a central spot and then proceed to the properties I was going to show her. Long before we all became equipped with cellphones, it was an act of good faith to schedule a meeting with no possible way of communication. That was irrelevant because in the numerous times that Cindy and I had appointments scheduled, she was always very late, by at least an hour. She never apologized. Ultimately I decided to end our relationship, even though that guaranteed I would not sell her a house. I had no patience for sitting in my car and being unproductive.
Being on time was always a piece of my personality. It made delivering our four children to school particularly stressful. They attended the Solomon Schechter School of Essex and Union, during the days when the brilliant Golda Och was alive and deeply involved in the school that now proudly memorializes her name. The issue was that the younger two of our kids attended the Lower School, which was then homed at the YM-YWHA on Green Lane in Union. The two older ones were at an entirely different site, a local Union synagogue. Dismissal times were different at each campus, necessitating two round trips to Union each afternoon. This kept me frantically taxiing as no other solution appeared in sight.
You may suggest a carpool. My response is, been there, done that. Never again. Not every partner in a carpool is equally diligent, responsible, reliable, or timely. I’ve known them all! There was the one who delayed departures consistently by insisting on squeezing her kids and mine into a tiny car when she had a large, well-equipped, much safer minivan at her disposal. Why she was so negligent I don’t know, but I finally gave up on my powers of persuasion and ended the ride-sharing. Then there were several who just couldn’t tell time My kids would be left at school or outside our home, bundled up in anticipation of a driver who didn’t deem it important to get to school promptly or pick them up on schedule. Not nice at all.
Thus I became the solo driver. And I always kept the promise I made to my kids: I will be there. Period. And I always was.
I’m a realist. If your flight is delayed or your doctor has an emergency, it’s out of your hands, and there’s not anything you can do about it. Similarly, traffic delays are mostly unavoidable and will play havoc with the most rigorous plan. And, of course, a flat tire makes all of us impotent!
But if you and your car are alive and healthy, please honor those who await you by being precisely on time. After all, timeliness is godliness!
Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 12. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com