And If You Go Chasing Rabbits”””””””””””

Ashford, Alabama was still a small town in the rural south when my mom and I moved there when I was four. It was a place where farmers and their families came to buy groceries, clothing and anything else they needed. My mom worked at a cotton gin that also sold pesticide and fertilizer. My grandfather owned a machine shop that existed to repair farm equipment and build peanut trailers and such other things as farmers needed. Every business in town was kept in business by the farmers. These farmers were self-employed. They had to be jack of all trades and worked doing what needed to be done without regard to 9 to 5 schedules or any schedule more exact than getting it all done. They were always busy doing things that had to get done but seldom had appointments to keep at an exact time. 

Everyone else sold something or provided some service to the farmers and needed to be at their place of business ready to do business when the farmers needed something and dropped by to get it. For example, I worked for my grandfather every summer at the machine shop. I never saw hours posted. We were typically there by 9 am and where almost always there by ten but there were exceptions.  We were all on farmer time, which is not 9 to 5 or tightly scheduled by exact time appointments but is more about being there to do your business so many more times than not when the farmer drops by that the farmer feels safe just dropping by and will be surprised and disappointed not to find you there. The occasional surprise is expected and accepted as long as you are there so routinely that not being there is a real surprise and so unusual that the farmer will still expect you to be there the next time he drops by.

I always walked fast enough in relation to other people during my adolescent years to amuse others with my obvious frustration at the way almost everyone else ambled and eased along. I could never stay with the flow of traffic, either in the halls at school or anywhere else and constantly felt that everyone else was in my way. It was not that I was in a hurry to get anyplace. I knew where I wanted to go but almost never had an appointment to keep or even any strong sense of what time it was according to the clock. It just felt to me as if everyone else just naturally oozed through the day at a pace that was totally unnatural to me. 

Later, when my life changed and I had appointments with various people at definite times, I would, at first, often simply forget to show up. I was never aware of the ticking of the clock even as I was intensely aware of how much more slowly most of the people around me moved than the pace that felt natural to me. I later learned to compensate by wearing a wrist watch and looking at it often as a symptom of my low-level frustration at being out of synch with most of the people who flowed through their own lives around me as I moved through my own at a frustrated crawl from my perspective but break-neck speed from theirs. I always remind myself of the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s work and often describe myself that way to others as a form of self-depreciating humor intended to signal my awareness of looking silly and my lack of offense at the amusement others find in my constant, mad dash to wherever it is I happen to be going at any given time.