A Bannerman is Never Late

Dad said, “Ok, I think we can probably hang out here till about 10:30, and then we need to scoot.” Mom said, “10:35 at the very latest, and then we need to skedaddle.” We were set to dine at Steve’s Marina at 11 for a nice Mother’s Day lunch, but I had convinced my parents to stop at a local coffee shop along the way. Dad was rolling up a Sweet N’ Low rapper like a tiny sleeping bag as he calculated our time of departure. 

We agreed on 10:35, despite the fact that the restaurant was only ten minutes away. This resulted in us arriving before the restaurant was technically open. We walked in upon the proprietor who held up a large laminated menu in front of herself as if we had just walked into the bathroom of her own house while she was bathing. 

I come from a prompt family. We are all prompt. And yet we’re a family of step and half siblings, so it’s a dominant gene that runs in two separate bloodlines, which suggests that this was ordained by God. When I mentioned we arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes early, that was just me and my parents. My brother and his family had been there five minutes already. 

“I’m here! But don’t rush.” That’s perhaps the most common text I send to my friends. If I’m picking them up, I will inevitably arrive while they are still in a reasonable period of getting ready. I try to be late. I make myself wait beyond what I think is a reasonable time to leave, and yet somehow I am still early. And I’m not making up lost time by speeding. A wormhole just opens up.

Now, I don’t claim to be a therapist, but I think this has something to do with the scrabbling to be in control of a situation. Being late makes me feel as if I’m free falling.

Loren Warnemuende

recently wrote a post about reoccurring dreams, and it reminded me of one particular nagging dream that pops up whenever my life feels particularly out of control: driving a car from the backseat. Usually someone is in the front, incapacitated, and I have to figure out how to steer over the headrest with no access to the brake. If it’s a particularly stressful time in my life, my subconscious throws in what it perceives to be the pinnacle of unpredictability:  a grey-black, chugging tornado.

Being on time (and by that I mean early) requires all my ducks to be in a row, which is exactly how I like my ducks. I like the process of organizing those ducks. I like the math it takes to calculate time of departure, having my clothes all sorted out if it’s an early morning venture, and then when I inevitably get to my destination ten minutes early, it’s rather peaceful to just sit in the driveway and admire my friend’s azaleas like a weirdo. When it comes to movies, I get to see not only all of the trailers but the screen’s brandname. I see the room when it’s lit up and the employees are sweeping up popcorn from the last movie. “Wow, must’ve been a wild one,” I say as I scootch past giant garbage cans and choose one seat in a sea of empty chairs. You can see the floors where all the black linoleum is peeling. The floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains are blotched in soda stains. Being early gets you that sort of insider privilege. 

Recently Mother gave each of her kids a box of childhood mementos. Buried in the bottom of my box was my first grade report card. If you are remotely my age, perhaps you remember report cards being filled out by hand and reporting more than just academic competence. I got an S (satisfactory) for manners and an N (needs work) for paying attention, but what was most confounding was that I got a U (unsatisfactory) for being on time. On the flip side of the report card was my attendance record, and across the grid of days and weeks, the letter T popped up regularly like one long 9-month stutter. 

“Ooook,” I said to my parents, waving the slightly yellowed report card in front of them while they drank their preferred homemade coffee. “In a house of four licensed adults, no one could get me to school on time?”

“It was your dad’s responsibility to get you to school,” Mother said as she playfully poked him in the arm. Dad took up the card and peered through the smaller lenses of his bifocals. Then he chuckled. Apparently he got a kick out of besmirching my good name. No one could come to an agreement on what caused the repeated tardies, but Dad speculated it was because I was a “rascal,” and I didn’t bother asking what that meant. 

But that reminded me of another instance in which I was late against my will. In my early teens when Mother and I were little more than civil to each other, I remember her intentionally making me late to practice¹. That’s how I perceived it at the time, anyway. I had been nagging her all morning to get her act together so that we could leave at a practical time, which was probably fifteen minutes earlier than necessary. I had boxed her in at the back door like a sheepdog while also hauling my tote bag and water bottle. I wore her purse slung around my neck and was obnoxiously jangling her car keys. And then, to my horror, the woman sidled past me and went and sat on the sofa. 

She just sat there. She didn’t even turn on the TV. I stood over her, bags and jackets and purses hanging from me like a hat stand, and I was absolutely gobsmacked. 

“Are you getting one of your migraines?”

“No.”

The clock rolled forward and gradually we were getting into the yellow zone, the time when all other people left their houses and showed up to practice with only five minutes to spare. But still she would not move. 

Knowing the fine line between insistence and disrespect, I couldn’t do much more than just watch her, observe her as an alien specimen, as the clock entered the orange zone (no extra time to arrive at destination) and then the red, the official territory of being late. Mother sat on the couch like a willful child and would not budge until at last we were officially, universally late. Somewhere at Pelican Ridge Community Park, home school children were practicing soccer (or maybe softball) as their kind, punctual mothers watched from the sidelines and actually loved their kids. I collapsed in a nearby armchair. Why bother going now? And that’s when Mother suddenly stood up, took the keys dangling from my lifeless grip, and headed out the door. 

On the drive there, I could only look at my Mother and think, “This woman made me late on purpose. People that care about you don’t intentionally set out to make you unhappy.”  And, unfortunately, I carried that line of thinking with me into adulthood, such that for a time I forgot the family’s genetic bent towards being on time and thought my hatred of being late stemmed from some trauma response of seeing my mother sitting stubbornly on the couch, reveling in my misery. I saw myself as a Scarlet O’Hara who emerged from that moment with a fist full of dirt and, shaking it to the sky, cried, “Gawd as my witness, I’ll never be late again.”

But I don’t think that’s true, and I want to tell the truth, even if it makes things less interesting, less hero vs. villain. I don’t think Mother was setting out to ruin my life. I think, perhaps, what she was suggesting was that I could actually be late and still have a good time. I had immediately interpreted it as a power play, as her trying to wrench what little control I had as a fourteen year old out of my hands, but what I think she was saying was, “Look, kid, you were fifteen minutes late and the world is still cranking along on its axis. Your friends are still your friends. Now get out there and have fun and stop being such a rascal.” 

Last night my writing group held its monthly meeting. And because my birthday is coming up, I wanted to bring the group pizza. I did the backwards math and accounted for traffic, the time it would take to pick up a friend along the way, and even the approximate one minute it would take for me to turn around in the narrow cul-de-sac where she lives. What I didn’t factor in was that I had failed to order the pizzas early, and pizzas don’t generally exist in a permanent state of hot and ready. But I decided that this would be an error easily overlooked. I had no history of being late with these people. As Mother had tried to teach me all those years ago, my friends would still be my friends, and the world would go on turning. God bless those little life lessons. I found myself relinquishing a little control. We pulled up to the house nearly a half-hour late. A little girl came skipping up to my car with a half-eaten cupcake.

“You’re late,” she said. “All the men are already here!” suggesting not so much that I had disappointed the writing group, but maybe just women as a whole. She ushered me inside to a living room of artists and poets and musicians who were happy to see me and the pizza. When my turn came around to present what I’d been working on, I opened my laptop with a slow creak.

“So…this is a rough draft of what I’ve written for my Substack.”

- lots of cordial nodding-

“It’s an essay on…how I’m always on time.”

The child with the cupcake, as she was being tucked into bed in a nearby room, listened to my essay as an underwhelming bedtime story. Having a few walls between us must’ve obscured parts of it, or else I told it badly. She concluded that I had written a piece about someone who “loved to be late,” and told her mother that my story was “very appropriate.”

“You mean because Sara was late tonight?”

“Yeah.”

1. Our homeschool group played a different sport every month, so it could’ve been soccer, volleyball, softball, or basketball. I honesty don’t remember which it was. My “uniform” was a t-shirt with my last name spray painted in cursive on the back, if that gives you an idea of my proximity to the big leagues.