THE BORN LESAR

Excuse me, have you been waiting long?

Hi there ... hey, wait just a minute, will you, I've got to finish clipping my toenails before we get started ... hold on just a sec ... one more ... good gravy, that big one is thick ... there we go, all finished until the holidays. Thanks for your patience. Some of those daggers were about to start poking through my shoe leather.

I didn't figure you'd mind waiting just a little while, you know, since you end up waiting for other people to do stuff all the time. It's like when you go to the convenience store, and the lady in front of you is buying three bananas, but doesn't seem to realize until the check-out girl has weighed the fruit and rung up the sale that she's actually going to have to pay for them, and only then does she start fumbling through her olive green naugahide handbag to find the plastic coin purse that her bank gave out as a Christmas gift back in 1974. Oh, yeah, she's got the exact change, but the nanners might be overripe by the time she finds it.

Have you ever tried to calculate the amount of your life that has been wasted in idle waiting? Just for estimation's sake, let's say that you're 60 now, and you've waited for something or other for an average of 10 minutes during each day of your life since you turned 18. That's 153,300 minutes, which doesn't include Leap Days, because, well, I didn't think you'd want to wait for me to figure that in. That amount of time is equivalent to just a little more than 106 days, which means you've spent well over three months of your adult life just standing around, chewing your fingernails and thinking, 'Cripes, now how long is this gonna' take?' In the case of the banana lady, probably about 8 more minutes, 'cuz now she's decided she wants a lottery ticket, too.

Some waiting is unavoidable, of course. You can't just expect to walk into places and have your every need filled immediately. When you go in for major thoracic surgery, for example, you're better off if the surgeon makes you wait 15 minutes or so after the anasthetic before he starts cutting. When you order a piping hot cappuccino, you're much wiser to wait 5 minutes before taking that first sip, otherwise you may need to have butt-area skin grafts sewn onto your upper lip, and that may just ruin that modeling career you've been chasing. And it goes without saying that you really need to wait while sitting at a red light in traffic, because if you don't, and then you cause a 12-car pileup, your insurance company will cancel your policy in less time than it takes to say, 'What the h---?' No, they don't wait. Don't seem fair, does it?

A lot of the waiting we do is for other people. Myself, well, I have a teen-age son who seems to think I have nothing better to do with my short time on this earth than sit in the passenger seat of the car while he sends the 47th text message in the last 18 minutes to somebody he just talked to a half hour ago. When I say impatiently, 'C'mon, let's go already,' he gives me a little sneer, peeved either that I'm pushing him or that his friend has taken more than 11 seconds to text back to him. I don't care, really, I just want to get to the grocery store and back before I'm eligible for Social Security.

It is common courtesy, I believe, that people should consider others' time when they are interacting. At the grocery store, for example, I want a checkout person who hurriedly scans the items, whips them into bags, and gets me on my busy was as fast as humanly possible. Some clerks sort of lollygag in their jobs, they pass the spaghetti sauce jar over the scanner, then glance around the store to see what's going on, and then they pick up the bread, then they mutter, 'D'ya find everything you were looking for?' even though they care less about your shopping list fulfillment than they do about the color of your socks, which is a trick question in my case anyway, 'cuz sometimes I like to mix 'n match red and blue. At the Kwik Loob oil change station, I just want the dude to drain my scummy vehicle liquids, pour in some new stuff, take my money, and send me on my way. If I'd wanted a tire rotation, or new wiper blades, or for him to fix that left rear turn signal that's been out since 2011, why, then, I wouldn't have picked a place called 'Kwik Loob,' now, would I have? And when I go to a 'fast' food place, for cryin' out loud, just give me the ham and cheese combo that I ordered without asking if I want regular or curly fries, a small, medium, large or super-size order, or if I want to donate $1 to help cure childhood disease. I'm in a hurry, can't you see? The movie starts in four minutes, and I'm gonna' be really miffed if I miss the preview for the latest Pixar film with Charlize Theron voicing the part of a mouse. I mean, she's so hot, even as a rodent.

A lot of people choose the things they like to do in life because of the amount of waiting, or lack thereof. Some folks hate baseball, because it takes forever for the pitcher to take the sign from the catcher, toss the rosin bag around, check the runner at first, spit, wink at the pretty girl in the third row (or nowadays, maybe the guy behind the dugout), check the runner again, spit, and then call time to ask the umpire for a new baseball. If you think about it, a typical 3-hour baseball game is four minutes of actual play, and 176 minutes of waiting. And they call that the national pastime? No wonder our kids trail the Republic if Stupidakistan in math and science scores. Fishing is another waiting-heavy hobby. I personally enjoy it, standing there waist-deep in a warm river, my line lazily drifting with the current, just the chance of a nibble enough to hold my interest for hours at a time. Other folks, forget it, waiting for a pea-brained fish to bite is like torture, almost worse than standing in line for an hour at a wake, just waiting to get to the casket to see if grandma's hair is as blue in death as it was in life, only to have the guy close the lid and say, 'Sorry, we're done for today. You'll have to come back to the funeral tomorrow.' Funeral? Aw, dang it, I was gonna' play golf tomorrow. I've been waiting to get on the course for weeks.

Of course you were. You're always waiting, for your favorite TV show to come on, for your wife to put her make-up on so you can go out to dinner without her looking like that beast you wake up with every morning, for a check to come in the mail, for your obnoxious neighbor to leave so you can have a piece of chocolate cake without having to share any, for your Uncle Fred maybe to drown on his fishing trip because you really think you're in his will now that you helped him fix his outboard motor.

Best to get used to it, I guess, life is like that, moving along at its own pace, not the speed at which you'd like. It's good you're not in a hurry, anyway, 'cuz the banana lady just remembered she's got a coupon somewhere in that coin purse. No, wait. She left it in the car. She'll be right back.