morethanenoughtruth

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…”

Timing is everything.  I learned that by changing schools again, and again, and again.  Between Miss Chater’s Newtonville, Massachusetts first grade and Westport, Connecticut’s Staples High School graduation ceremony, I attended twenty-one different schools.  Most problematic was being whip-sawed back and forth between Northeast and Southwest, time after time after time after time.

Most obvious was always being the new girl, the one that others stared at but didn’t engage.  I learned it oh so well.  The school cafeteria was the main battleground.  Entering that dreaded domain, I headed for the nearest empty table and staked my claim.  I ate fast, hoping to escape before anyone might notice that no one sat with me.  Too often, I skipped the cafeteria line entire, spending lunch money for ice cream or candy to munch while hiding in a book.

Even more basic than the social confusion of being ever on the move, was learning to speak at correct speed.  Texans take their time expressing themselves, snuggling down into the full possibilities inherent in the diphthong, drawing phrases out and up, often ending as a question where none is asked nor implied.  A Texan owns his time.  He feels safe settling into it and getting comfortable.  In the Lone Star State children are taught not to interrupt while another is speaking.  In a discussion, all will wait until the speaker has completed his thought, and then allow a full beat to elapse before jumping in to interject their own thought.

In the Northeast, especially in New York City the opposite applies; In a friendly discussion, speakers are surrounded by hungry adversaries who pace, salivating, surrounding the teller’s tale, alert for any hint of an incipient pause, wherein they might dart, snatch a word, and supplant their own cuckoo-bird opinion in its place.  New Yorkers talk fast.  Everybody knows that.  I learned it again and again at gut level.  There is an art to interruption, and I have yet to master it.  It can be done seamlessly incurring little offence, but as a born Texan, that perfect act of timing eludes me.  If I interrupt, I draw scowls of derision, even accusations of being impolitic.  My timing is just… off.

An apposite example of NY parlance could be any Woody Allen movie.  There are no pauses.  Each speaker is an island alone.  No one listens, but everyone natters in an uninterrupted arc of verbal vomitus, every response a non-sequitur, non-responsive since no one has listened to anyone else.  I can’t bear to sit through a Woody Allen movie.  It incites a temporary insanity that lasts until I can go home and hide until my heart settles down to a normal southern sinus rhythm.

I tried to moderate my writer’s group once, but was precipitously fired because one of our New York members interpreted my pause for the requisite beat as proof that I didn’t know what to say.  I acquiesced, not wanting to moderate anyway.  Others were better suited to that chore…some really great.

The timing of speech patterns does bring up a vital question: Are fast speakers smarter than slow?  I suspect they are.  Like playing challenging video games, speaking fast must urge people to think in like manner.  I saw this played out in my school-girl musical chairs/schools.  Dallas, Sherman, and Irving were always a year behind Waltham, Watertown, and Westport.  At each move, I had to run to catch up, or settle for a snooze, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line I had landed.  I made good grades, but never the straight A’s to which I aspired, and my checkered performance assured me that whatever I did, no matter how slow or how fast I did it, I would never be good enough.

One saving grace in this comedy of ill-timing, netting questionable performance has been a curious gift of creativity.  No matter where I found myself, I was ever alert and aware, paying attention, and noticing.  Trading school-days for work-days, imagination bridged any gap, whether real or hypothetical.  Rote memory has never been my strength, but a new breaking concept would often save the day.  I trained myself to forget the details of a previous job after settling into the next.  Why devote cognitive real estate to the past? Even the Buddha extolled beginner’s mind.  I have come to accept myself as a Yellow Rose of Texas, retarded in my speech, but a noticer, appreciator, and cultivator of “wild hares.”

Once while living and working on the farm, my paternal family’s homestead west of Ft. Worth, I named the new street to my new home “Jackrabbit Track” to honor the flow of new ideas popping up in remembered conversations with my Grandfather as we enjoyed evening walks, scaring up the occasional jackrabbit, opossum, or armadillo.  The local postmistress informed me that the US Postal Service does not recognize “Track” even if it is made by Texas jackrabbits.  The FEDS renamed my street “Jackrabbit Trail,” but I proceeded to use “Jackrabbit Track” as my return address until I moved to Sherman for a better paying job at Johnson & Johnson.  Bureaucrats drive me nuts.  Maybe it’s a timing issue, as in marching to a different drummer…or dreamer.  The truth is that jackrabbits don’t create trails, those roadways laid down by mindless following, nose to tail the rabbit ahead to wherever some rabbit somewhere up front might be heading.  A jackrabbit zig-zags back and forth, dodging obstacles, anticipating leaps ahead, leaving pursuers behind and befuddled.  Bunnies make trails; Jackrabbits make tracks.

***

As a pre-teen, I visited for two weeks most summers with my grandparents on that familiar home place.  Given all the moving around, the homestead was a comforting familiar.  In the pasture beyond the fenced front yard there was an ancient oak tree with several generations of farming detritus strewn about its roots.  There were wagon wheels, rims, chain, wire, lanterns, gears, pails, and innumerable miscellany.  Most were rusty, but all were full of imaginative possibility.  It was my own special Skunk-works.

With these junk components I conglomerated numerous marvels of invention.  I made a bicycle with wheels that turned in place but didn’t go anywhere.  There was a rocket ship, a loom, and an escalator.  There was even a horse and buggy, but you had to imagine the horse.  I filled the hours in between Grandma’s meals with my serious “work.”

A scrawny child but growing aggressively, I never lost track of the possibilities of breakfast: Eggs, sausage, steaming buttermilk biscuits, fresh churned butter, pear preserves and red-eye gravy.  There were high noon farm hand dinners spread on the dining room table, the old oilcloth clean but sticky and quiet evening suppers, retrospective warm-ups of the noontide feast.  Those meals must have been inspired by memories of men, strong, hot and dripping sweat, just in from the hayfield and powerful hungry.

The hours under my tree were peopled with those laborer’s ghosts and empowered by their implements laid aside just in case someday they might prove useful to the work at hand.  Fortified with Grandma’s cooking, I toiled.  Grasshoppers buzzed.  Dragonflies chased and caught each other, then lit all-coupled on the quiet creek skim, celebrating the marvels of surface tension.  Cicadas shrilled a solid wall of scream.  I had all I needed to complete my task.

Each object had a right place where it fit, each necessary to the whole.  All the parts went together, mechanisms incarnate.  They lived.  Wheels turned.  Bearings screeched.  Rims rolled.  Chains pulled.  Pails frothed with warm buttery milk.  Old harness became pliant and slick with horse and sweat.  Square nails and rusty rings married dreams, as once they had bonded boards and leather strapping.  Time shrank while I embodied happiness.

One evening Grandpa came to visit me under my tree.  I showed him my wondrous creations, demonstrating how each one worked.  We spoke of future projects.  I confided my worry that since everything had already been thought of there would be nothing left for me to invent.  He assured me there were marvels yet to come, and said to keep an open mind for “wild hares” passing.  As light faded to the west and early stars blinked on, we walked together toward the house and rest.  I slipped my hand into his.  “Grandpa,” I whispered, “you know, don’t you, that I don’t really believe my machines are real?  They are ‘just pretend’ like the mud-pies Grandma and I made when I was little.”

He looked down at me, eyes twinkling but with a face full of serious. “Sure,” he said.  “I know. But you can never tell with those jackrabbits.”

***

That was a different time, a different place, a different perception of self and what propels today’s reality.  Timing, whatever iteration of the real, will always be part of the equation.