Messy Musings on Time & Work

Nothing was ever wasted in my house when I was growing up. Plastic utensils were washed and re-used. Ketchup bottles were emptied completely before they were tossed into the bright green recycling bin in our garage¹. Time was precious, our most important commodity.

My father worked long and hard hours in a hot kitchen, cooking expensive meals for people with expensive taste. He came home every night just in time for the 10 p.m. news, just in time for me to kiss him goodnight before I scampered away to bed. His white chef’s jacket was always stained, splattered with sauce and grease, and when I reached up to give him a hug and a kiss on his tired cheek, he always smelled like sweat and grease and work.

My mother worked in an office and the details of her job were always a mystery to me. I called her every afternoon when I got home from school, and she would always pick up with the line “Professional Billing, this is Edna, how can I help you?” She never sounded like my mother then. Instead, her voice was sterile and removed. “It’s me,” I always said, and instantly her voice warmed as she asked me how my day at school was. In the late afternoon, she’d come home and iron other people’s clothes for a little extra money while she watched the soap operas she made me program the VCR to record², because there was never enough money around.

Work. That’s all my parents ever did. We hardly went on any sort of family vacations, and I was always jealous of my friends who came back from any sort of school break with pictures from Disneyland³ and Sea World and the beautiful beaches in Mexico. My friends were well traveled, even in the third grade! Devin Myers spent Thanksgiving break in Ohio, Leigh Havins lounged with her family at their beach house in Puerto Penasco over Spring break, and Jessica Gillies went to Germany for Christmas! Having never spent any time outside of Tucson, Arizona, even Ohio seemed like an exciting and foreign place that I’d wished my parents would take me.

This is not to say that I never got to spend time with my family, that my parents were so removed from my life and so obsessed with their jobs that I raised myself and my younger brother and always had nice things because they worked so much and opted to buy me the love they had no time to give. It wasn’t like that at all. I remember huge elaborate dinners during the holidays—intricate salads with tons of vegetables that I didn’t even like, roasted garlic potatoes that were so good that there were never leftovers, rice pilaf and prime rib that was so tender and juicy that I forgot that I never really liked eating red meat that wasn’t nestled between a hamburger bun. My father would wake up early on Christmas Day, or Thanksgiving, or any other day that merited such a meal, and start cooking. I’d wake up to the smell of his coffee brewing and the sound of pans clattering, and I would get out of bed and watch him cook. He always described to me what he was doing, in something that was like a foreign language to me: “Dice the shallots and put them in the pan with white wine and let it reduce. Then you can add the cream and season with salt and pepper.” His words never stuck with me, really, as I opted to simply watch his hands so precisely chop vegetables and stir things in at just the right time.

Time was important in my family, because of work and school and our otherwise busy schedules. I grew up plagued by time--Only time will tell. Time will heal all wounds. I need time. Bad timing⁴. I wondered about time zones, stopped wishing at 11:11 because of my confusion about them⁵, thought for a second that there was a chance I could maybe live forever if I kept heading west because that's where all the time seemed go.

When I sit backwards on the train, I'm able to watch where I've come from waver and blur and disappear right in front of me. It's simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. Inspiring, really. Time passes. But I'm still here. These days I've been spending my days working at a small, independently run cafe conveniently situated two minutes away from my house. Most mornings I open the cafe, which I prefer over closing because I get out in the early afternoon which leaves me with ample opportunity for learning and knowing and spending time with the people in my life that I am the most excited about. I like summer because days are longer, the sun doesn't fully set until nearly 9 p.m. and everything just feels so full in a good way.

Let's spend some time together.

P.S. I've been really into the song "Calendar Girl" by Stars. It's about time passing and is just about the most depressing or hopeful thing I've ever heard, depending on my mood.

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¹ Once, my father caught me trying to dispose of a ketchup bottle that still had its hard-to-squeeze bottom-of-the-bottle contents. He gently took the bottle from my hands and showed me a trick—add a spot of water, shake it around, and, like magic, the rest of the ketchup squirted out effortlessly. I used this trick every time I had the opportunity, and eventually got in trouble for watering down my mother’s favorite shampoo.
² I think this was one of my mother’s favorite things in life. One Life to Live and General Hospital were her favorites, and she would get absurdly yet sincerely upset when the VCR malfunctioned and didn’t record them. That started to happen fairly frequently, and that is when we got a new VCR.
³ I've still never been.
⁴ The story of my romantic life, or, the reason for my lack of a romantic life^‡.
⁵ I also used to wish on fallen eyelashes but stopped when I found one of them on the page of a book I was reading.

^‡ Despite the negative tone of this statement, I'm actually in a really positive place in this area of my life right now. Romance seems to be a difficult thing to negotiate in the sort of casual situations I've gotten myself involved in as of late. I've been saving the tenderness for my friends--candlelit sushi dinners, climbing into your bed early in the morning to wake you up with nuzzles and snuggles, taking the long way home just to spend more time together, breakfast in the morning, making dinner and doing the dishes together. It feels really, really good because I really, really love my friends.