The world is a busy place. And I can say, with dubious pride, that there have been few people in it this past quarter century who have been busier than I.
So busy, in fact, have I been, that I have often looked like the man who is still running to catch a train that has already left the station. Over the years, many tasks remained undone as I rushed headlong after the next priority, never quite sure whether or not that newest demand on my time would be successfully met before the next urgent matter would cry out for my attention.
I read recently that this affliction – and affliction it truly must be – is something modern health-care professionals call “hurry sickness.” Sufferers of this malady buzz about so frantically most of the time trying to cross items off the impossibly long “to do” lists we’ve created for ourselves in this hectic age, that we have no time to simply enjoy life. We gobble meals on the run, drive our cars and trucks much too quickly, try to perform multiple tasks at the same time and read our novels and magazines as though we were in a constant all-night cramming session in advance of a final exam.
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This winter I became starkly aware of how this extreme busyness has manifested itself in my life. I was in a hockey arena dressing room, quickly getting ready to go onto the ice. Hurriedly lacing up my skates, I noticed a wee, clear, plastic thingy sticking out of the tongue of my right skate. It was one of those little wiry affairs crossed like a capital “T” at each end, which clothing retailers fasten to their products to hold bits of light card paper showing the brand name of the item along with the price, washing instructions, etc. It is customary for shoppers, within minutes of bringing their newest purchase into the house, to find a scissors and cut all these plastic doofrickies out of jeans, or coats or shirts or gloves. This procedure, on average takes a normal person between 30 and 60 seconds to perform, depending on the number of the little flippies are attached to the new item.
Now, apparently, when I brought my new skates home from the store, I got too involved in some other important task, to sever the little dooey from at least the one skate tongue which still sported it that recent day. Now, I certainly cannot claim to be the first person to have ever “forgotten” to cut the tag holders off his new skates and this little time lapse would represent no cause for concern except for one small fact.
I bought the skates in 1976.
Twenty-eight years have gone by since the skates and I met and I have been too time-deprived throughout that entire period to perform the minor thingyectomy I should have carried out on the first day they were in my possession. In fact, I am sure the checkout person, as I was paying for the skates, would have been happy to have produced some scissors and snipped off the little doodad right there and then before my purchase was ever handed to me.
By my calculation, 883,080,000 seconds of my life have ticked away since I bought my skates and I have not been able to set aside 30 of those seconds to properly de-doofrickie them. But, in my defence, I’ve been busy. I’ve changed jobs five times, changed domiciles five times, married once and had two children. I’ve taken several trans-Atlantic flights, written hundreds of newspaper stories, cut billions of blades of grass and watched thousands of hours of mindless TV shows. Drank cups of coffeeshop coffee by the uncountable gallons.
But, never had the time to cut the little blippy off my skate.
Now, this small oversight might still be of absolutely no significance if I wasn’t able to connect it to some other perfect proof of how proscrastination has bedevilled, if not my life, then at least my sporadic hockey career. Having finally laced up my skates, I picked up my stick to head for the ice and in a moment of clarity, realized that this poor piece of lumber, bought in a burst of consumerism on the same day as my skates, has never had even one linear inch of hockey tape affixed to its blade. For those of you unfamiliar with the rituals of hockey, it should be related that the first thing a conscientious player does before taking a new stick onto the ice is to tape up the blade with black or white tape. I think this tradition had its origins in the long-ago players’ belief that thus enwrapping their stick blades would prevent them from breaking so easily under the stress and strain of banging other players on the head, shins and back of the legs.
Whatever the explanation, the blade on my new stick, up to that recent day when I took to the ice, had never seen tape. How, I wonder, could there not have been 10 free minutes in the past 14,716,800 minutes to wrap a few swaths of hockey tape around my stick?
But, in this latter piece of evidence of my excessive laziness/hastiness, lies a curious irony. Had I been a super-efficient, laid-back man who had carefully taped up his stick that first day, it is certain it would never have lasted 28 years. The tape would have trapped in water from the ice and rotted out the wood in a year or two. Untaped, the wood was always given a chance to dry out after a tour of duty on the ice. And now, there are hockey fanatics hanging around the arena eager to trade their truck, their TV and their tabby cat for it.
The real reason, however, for the fact that the little plastic tab was still on the skates and there had been no tape ever affixed to my stick is this.
I always thought I might have to take them back.
©2004 Jim Hagarty
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