Have you noticed that, as a phenomenon — those of you who are no longer young pups? It seems to take for-freaking-EVER to get out the door, whether it’s in the morning for an early meeting or for a mid-day or evening excursion. And it’s crazy-making.
No doubt it would be crazy-making for a young adult companion, too, if I had one around. Can you remember waiting for your mother or grandmother to make a last-minute run to the toilet, whether she needed to go or not, because God Forfend that she should have to use a public loo? We would be running right on time and just as I was grabbing the doorknob to usher her out the door, she’d make an about-face and head for the back of the house. 😀
Well, I have no fear of public bathrooms, but that notwithstanding, it seems like I never can get out the door on time. And I find myself wondering why…what am I doing differently now that I didn’t do when I was a kid?
When I was TA-ing my way through graduate school, the university invariably gave me 7:40 classes, every goddamn morning. At the outset, we lived an hour away from campus; later we moved downtown, shortening the commute to a mere 40 minutes. But to that drive time, add time to park, hike across the campus to the decrepit TA office, try to get in, walk to a public phone and call a campus cop to come unlock the door, wait around till he showed up, get whatever stuff I needed, and then hike to the other end of the campus to meet my classes in the engineering or math building. So I probably left around 6 a.m. I don’t remember eating anything: I probably didn’t eat breakfast at that time.
Today I won’t leave the house until I’ve consumed a couple mugs of French press coffee and something to eat.
I didn’t have a dog to feed and make secure before leaving the building. Today I have two of them.
At first we lived in an apartment: one door to lock. When we moved to our first house, there were four doors to lock up, but again: no dog to wrangle inside or outside. And at six in the morning, only one of the doors would have been unlocked, just long enough for me to dodge out to the car.
Today — having enjoyed two home invasions during my lifetime plus an attempted rape plus the Incident of the Cat Burglar on the Roof — you may be damn sure I live behind locked doors and windows. Eight doors, to be precise. Two sliding doors, each with three separate locking devices in various positions and at different heights from the floor; three exterior doors with deadbolts and locking handles; three steel security doors with hardened dead bolts that will break your effing drill if you try to drill the lock open. That would be…hmmm…FIFTEEN LOCKS to have to secure, and to have to check before you leave the house.
No, make that SIXTEEN. Back in the dark ages, we did not have computers that stored our entire personal and business lives, computers whose loss to a burglar would amount to a major catastrophe. Sooo…I didn’t have a solid-core door on my office secured with yet another drill-proof hardened dead bolt.
A locked door functions in exactly the same way as a set of stairs does. Whatever you want is on the other side. Forget your purse: you have to find your keys, wrestle a deadbolt open, retrieve the purse, wrestle the deadbolt shut. Oh, forgot the file you were supposed to bring? Find your keys, wrestle…wash, rinse, repeat. Sometimes two or three times before you can get out the door…
Come to think of it, there was no e-mail. So there were no messages to check and respond to before you so much as brushed your teeth. That surely saved a lot of time!
When the neighbors divorced and we got custody of their German shepherd — my first German shepherd, my greatest German shepherd, my greatest dog — that of course added dog feeding to the morning race-around. By then, though, I had paid my dues in the TA department and was no longer teaching wee-hours sections. And all Greta ate was kibble: nothing could be easier.
Today’s dogs eat fancy kitchen-made food that has to be measured out on a kitchen scale. The food competition must be refereed, lest blood flow.
Still pretty sure that at that point I probably didn’t eat breakfast. If I did, it was something like cheese and fruit — nothing that had to be cooked. We made our coffee in a Chemex, which didn’t require much time or attention.
No one ever heard of hauling water or tea or coffee around in the car with them.
Today I won’t leave the house without a car-friendly mug of iced water or hot coffee.
When I was a pretty young thing, I wore contact lenses. A pair of nonprescription shades resided in the car or in my purse. I most certainly did not require three freaking pairs of prescription glasses to navigate the world. The progressive glasses, which I need for driving but which do not work for living inside the house and which, goddamn them, render a computer unusable, are always, invariably, every freaking day on the other side of the locked office door, a discovery always, invariably, every freaking day made as I’m sticking the key in the car’s ignition.
A forgotten item that is remembered once you’re in the car, then, requires you to unlock and relock two deadbolts: one to the kitchen door and one to the office.
And when I was a pretty young thing, often I didn’t wear make-up. Today I would frighten small children if I left the building without slathering the requisite three layers of opaque crud over the face.
Back in the day, I grabbed my purse, ran out the door, slammed it and locked it behind me, jumped in the car, and drove away.
Yeah. Okay. It makes sense now. It is objectively true that forty years ago getting out of the house was faster and easier than it is today. And maybe it’s not a function of age so much as a function of our times.
Do you find that to be true in your neck of the woods?