Human Interest
Waiting for the Wrong Moment
Just give it a minute
The Department of Motor Vehicles, a hospital waiting room and jury duty. Few among us spring up in the morning excited about any of these destinations. Either a soulless bureaucracy must be appeased, or we must sit soaked in hope and worry, or we have to answer a cattle call before being made to judge another’s fate.
As the saying goes, “Time waits for no man.” Actually this is just a snippet of a very old and longer proverb, “Time and tide wait for no man and the tide and the time that you were born shall be blessed.” Multiple sources suggest credit should go to St. Marher in 1225. In the parlance of the time, “And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet.” Frankly, it all seems like a bit of murky scholarship but for present purposes, let’s simply accept what we have. We are ferried through time, making many pauses but no stops — even when the clock seems to dog us.
When I moved to New York from Arkansas, I had to get a new driver’s license. This was before the days of enhanced licenses, the burden of really, really proving one’s identity, and all that requires. No, this was just me, a licensed driver in one state, trying to get a license in another. This feat of bureaucratic legerdemain took no less than five separate trips to the…
