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 sync 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.
