I’ve saved so much time,

I don’t have time for anything

Now that I’m 74 andmost of the sand has slipped through my hour glass, I often wonder whatever happened to the art of “waiting.”

I mean as a kid I’d put a quarter and the top from a box of breakfast cereal in an envelope, mail it and then wait - three, four, even five weeks - for my Tom Mix “de-coder ring” to arrive. By the time the mailman handed it over I was aflame.

(I never knew what I was supposed to de-code as my pals were a pretty verbal group, but every kid had to have a ring. With war raging, we often played war games. A half-brick was a grenade. No “Bang. Bang. You’re dead.” When you were hit by a “grenade” you thought you were killed and your mother was sure of it.)

If I wanted to phone a buddy down the street, I’d often have to wait 30 minutes while Mrs. Hitt, who shared a party line with us, explained her rhubarb pie recipe to Mrs. Evans.

Now every kid who can pull up his “PulI-Ups” has a cellular phone. I think it’s the law – sort of like having to wait to get your driver’s license.

My grandkids have cellular phones that can perform more functions than the dials in the cockpit of the Apollo space craft. So what do they do? Sit side by side and instantly text each other or a classmate they’ve just spent six hours with.

Heaven forbid if one of them had lived during “the War.” (That’s World War II to anyone born between 1930 and 1950.) I had two brothers who served in the Pacific.

Mother and Dad actually sat down at the old roll-top desk in our hallway and wrote each one a letter – Carter’s ink, fountain pen, real stationery - two or three times a week. Then they’d wait five or six weeks before they’d get a reply from the “front”.

I recently fired off a letter to 50-plus members of the Gallatin Lions Club with the push of a single button on my computer. Like an over-due check to a collection agency, responses almost crossed in the mail.

Now rather than spending a week driving the family across county on a vacation trip, we hop on a plane because of what? It saves time. No waiting.

Used to I had to physically get up out of my easy chair and turn on the TV, jiggle the rabbit ears a few times and then wait - for a hazy black and white picture to flicker across the oval screen. Now I click on my TV and immediately I’m bombarded with ads that promise to cut the waiting time on my computer in half, if I’ll just switch my service. Hey, I’m retired. I can wait 15 or 20 seconds.

It seems everything now is built to “save time”. Yet, all I hear from young people is how they can’t get anything done because they “don’t have time.”

With all these “time saving” devices, my grandkids are going to have “saved” so much time by the time they’re adults they’ll be able to bank it like nickels and quarters in their piggybank.

I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime soon we didn’t have a federal Department of Time. Just think about it. Democrats and Republicans in Congress can wrestle over the appointment of the cabinet secretary like it was raising the debt limit.

Nothing are bigger “time savers” than some of the appliances in our houses.

For example, if my mother wanted to cook something, she stuffed a few sticks of kindling in the old cast-iron stove, lit them and waited. Now I can pull a complete dinner out of my refrigerator, pop it in the microwave and be eating in five minutes.

Mother cooked everything from scratch. “Fast food” to me was grabbing a cold biscuit and stuffing it with a couple of slices of cold bacon, both left over from breakfast, and dashing out the back door to meet my pals on the ball field.

Part of the enjoyment of having a cup of coffee back then was sniffing the luscious aroma while it perked. Now my dentist has a coffeemaker in his office that spews out any one of 10 flavors before my finger leaves the “brew” button.

Monday was always “wash day” in our house.  On Mondays, mother tugged and pushed a heavy porcelain machine over to the kitchen sink, filled it with water from the spigot, added some soap, dirty clothes and then waited - anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours, depending on what else she had to do.

Finally she had to lug the clean clothes to the back yard where she hung them on a “clothes line,” but first she had to run them through a hand-cranked ringer. About 4 o’clock in the afternoon, after the sun had done its duty, she’dorder me to retrieve the wash so she could iron it.

“Wash-and-wear” and “wrinkle free?” We didn’t know what they were.

Now my wife Eben has a washer and dryer sitting side by side in our washroom. If she has an iron, she must keep it locked up with her late mother’s wedding ring because I’ve never seen it.

In many ways I guess we were “deprived.” We had one phone. It was black and sat on a tiny table with wobbly legs in the hallway. We often had to wait to use it. We had to wait on the stove to heat up. We sometimes spent two days driving to Florida. If I wanted to look up something, I had to go to the library and ask the librarian to point me to the encyclopedias.

Sometimes I wonder what I would have done with all those “extra” minutes if I had had them when I was growing up. Oh, well, that’s just wasting my extra time.

by Charlie Appleton