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?
Aaaaand not restricted to gals of a certain age. It often takes me two or three trips to the truck to make it out of the driveway….Need my phone…appointment book…phone book of vendors…requisite folders or forms…wallet….cash….tools…maybe a list of errands that need to be completed. On the other hand when DD2 was in town this Spring she decided to spend some “quality time” with me as I did some errands. After agreeing to go…she slipped her “Toms” on and grabbed her “purse/wallet”, which is about the size of a soup can….and said “let’s go”…. I began the “scramble” to depart and she announced…”I’m in the truck”……Sheeeezzz…..
heh heh heh! At least she didn’t have to wait while you visited your private throne because you don’t want to sit down on a public seat. 😀
It’s weird, isn’t it? We seem to accrue junk to do (or to bring along) like ships accrue barnacles!!
Before I leave the house I need to:
Feed and water the cats.
Check the incontinence pads and deal with any accidents.
Drink a mug of coffee.
Check my email, the weather, the stock market, etc.
(Sometimes I give up at this point.)
Water those plants not reached by the sprinklers.
Eat something.
Take my vitamins (multi, vitamin D, vitamin B12, niacin, omega 3, calcium, etc., etc., etc.)
Clean up after the cats and myself (dishes out of the sink and into the dishwasher, area around the food bowls swept or wiped).
Make the bed (sort of).
Brush and floss my teeth.
Shower and wash my hair.
Cover myself with lotions and potions.
Put on clean clothes.
Hide laptop.
If I’m going to be on foot, put my wallet, glasses, keys in pockets and hide purse.
Make sure I remembered to close and lock the back door.
Close and lock the front door.
It helps to do certain things the night before (watering, vitamins, shower, teeth) and skip some others (eating, cleaning up, email checking). But some things, such as cat urine, can’t be anticipated and must be dealt with immediately. In fact, urine can put the kibosh on the whole morning.
When I was young, petless and lived in an apartment, I would sleep until the last possible moment, shower, brush, dress and dash out the door.
YES! The plants are as bad as the pets!! Here in lovely uptown Arizona, if you don’t water a potted outdoor plant EVERY SINGLE DAY during the summer, it will croak right over. And you have to water them in the morning, before they start to fricasee.
Begins to make downsizing to an apartment look pretty good, doesn’t it?
Interesting. At least you actually realized that it was a lot do with extra steps and not just attributing it to being older or slower or more forgetful.
That’s a lot of locks!
Too darn many doors and windows! 😀
Part of it is the cautiousness (okay, let’s call it what it is: raw fear) that comes with experience. I didn’t have 16 locks and three solid steel security doors on the house because I hadn’t been burgled; I hadn’t come within a gnat’s eyebrow of being raped in my own home; I hadn’t been extracted from my home by a SWAT team pursuing an armed robber & kidnapper holed up in my garage. None of my neighbors had been chopped to death by an ax murderer (surprised in mid-burglary when she came home from the beauty parlor); none had had one of her two doberman pinschers stolen from her backyard; none had been beaten and raped repeatedly through the night by a guy who watched her house, knew the only window that wasn’t alarmed and knew when her husband went out of town…and on and on.
Psychologically I was a lot more carefree than I am today…but probably a lot more foolish.
With age comes paranoia.
Wow! Did all of that happen in your current neighborhood? I can certainly understand why you’d take extra precautions because you live alone but I had no idea you’d had so many close calls over the years.
LOL! No, that has happened over the course of my adult life, which has been unduly lengthy. I’ve lived in central-city neighborhoods since marrying the Corporate Lawyer, who (quite reasonably) didn’t want to commute from the suburbs. First we lived in a lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto; now I live in what is fast becoming a Young Professionals’ ghetto. People who want to live in centrally located, low-commute neighborhoods have to put up with moneyed developers’ pressure on the City Parents to push the middle class into the suburbs and with the presence of homelessness, drugs, and crime.
I’m 66; I get up at 5:20 every weekday and leave my house by 6:10. I pack everything I can the night before, and I make a list of last minute things to bring (like food out of the refrigerator/freezer) the night before. It’s just a matter of putting on clothes (that I set out the night before) and collecting things from my list. If I bring my computer home, I put it in front of the door the night before so I can’t forget it. Glasses are in my bag the night before.
No pets any more, though.
Ah, the list! That’s excellent. And the put-it-where-you’ll-stumble-over-it strategy is also very effective.
On the other hand… 😀 (oh, this isn’t funny: baaaad emoticon!)…
My daughter-in-sin used to pack up her car the night before. She had several small children, and you know what THAT’S like when it comes to getting out of the house. So her strategy was to put everything she knew she would need into the car in the evening. Then all (“all”!!!) she had to do the next morning was wrangle the kids out of bed, through breakfast, through getting dressed, and into the vehicle.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Except one evening someone forgot to close the garage door….
Naturally someone stole the car, along with her purse and everything else she’d stashed in there.
Could there be such a thing as being too organized???