I Can't WAIT!

By Roberta Durra            

           “Impatience”, I shall call it by its proper name, has dogged me since childhood and til’ this day continues to be my steady sidekick.  It sabotages many a meal in my kitchen, and wreaks havoc on all kinds of projects. Patience, on the other hand, is very much like my middle name…the name I never use, forget I have, but is there if needed for legal reasons.

            If you think I’m kidding about being impatient…allow me to enlighten you.

I flip to the end of a mystery novel to read the last page before I’m even through chapter 1. 

            I have washed so many wool sweaters in the washing machine, rather than taking time to hand wash, that my niece has an entire shrunken winter wardrobe for her Barbie doll.

            To best illustrate my lack of patience, you can ask my old college boyfriend. He most reluctantly agreed to part with his favorite jean jacket so I could embroider the classic Grateful Dead skull and roses logo on it. I easily drew out the design but then found the tediousness of hand embroidery grueling and annoying. Months later (tail between my legs) I returned his special jacket with a beautifully embroidered letter G, partially embroidered letter R, and only half of an embroidered rose.  

            My impatience has dealt some mean blows, particularly in the kitchen. The meals I prepare range from Food Network perfection to Horror Network nightmares. Take a bite, scream, and run for your life. That’s because I tend to choose difficult recipes, but then don’t follow the directions or measure the ingredients. Sure, a dab here, a dash there often works perfectly, but when it’s clearly not working, I become desperate. I have been known to impulsively dump a half bottle of red wine in the pot, and call it a day. This is right before I dump the whole shebang down the garbage disposal, leaving my kitchen with the sweet, inviting aroma of a home cooked meal, and my family with ‘In-And-Out Burgers’.

            I remember feeling impatient at 8 years of age while playing with a toy called Creepy Crawlers. It had molds of bug-like creatures, into which plastic goop was poured before being heated on an electric hot plate. The idea was to cook, cool, and then carefully remove your creepy crawly bugs with the provided tweezers. I was barely able to make myself wait 15 minutes to cook my crawlers, and completely incapable of waiting 10 minutes to cool them. The tweezers were awkward, so I got some pretty gnarly burns on my fingers pulling out freshly cooked crawlers. Is there a statute of limitations on bug burns, MATTEL?

            At the same time, my cousin had a really cool cotton candy machine. The trouble with that toy was you had to wait until the sugar was fully whipped by the machine and turned in to cotton. If you couldn’t wait for the machine to stop, like a “friend” of mine couldn’t, you’d get stung on your forearms with pellets of sugar. You can imagine that Band Aids on my fingers from Mattel, along with red rashes on my arms from sugar pellets, gave me a very attractive 3^rd grade look.

Funny…or is it, that even now, at this writing, my forearms are sporting 3 burns received during the preparation of 3 recent meals.

            If you’re not yet convinced I have a slight issue with patience, the list goes on…

When I do wear nail polish, it has tread marks on it from touching too early to see if it’s dry.

Put up wallpaper with me and after 45 minutes I will say, “You do it”, and let you finish the job alone.

            It’s not easy walking this impatient path. Why can’t I be more like Arnold Schwarzenegger?  He waited 13 years to tell Maria about his illegitimate child. He is nothing if not a patient man.

            The irony is I have never really considered myself impatient. But my inability to wait was brutally evidenced this Easter when I went to a friend’s egg decorating party. I brought lots of crafts to glue on to eggs. (FYI…a glue gun’s the fastest way to attach anything to anything). It’s just that while everyone was patiently dipping their eggs, letting the colors deeply sink in, I was towel drying my faintly colored eggs and plugging in the glue gun. Impatient or not, the eggs looked damn good!

            Looking back, the piece de resistance came when I was working wardrobe on a low budget movie. I was asked to be the “dead body” in a scene. All I needed to do was lay in a ditch while they filmed the actors talking in front of me. (Patience, by the way, is defined as “The capacity for waiting”). I couldn’t hear what was going on, and I was very curious, so I kept peeking out from the bunker while they were filming, infuriating the director. I’d peek. He’d yell. I’d lie still for a bit, then peek. He’d yell. Finally, I made myself stay still in the hole. This was not easy for me. And where did this great restraint leave me? When they finished the scene, they forgot to tell me, and left me in the ditch.

            At this point in my life, I can honesty say that I have the patience of a baby gnat, combined with the wisdom of a mother gnat who says “Slow down, baby gnat. You’ll do better if you take a little more time with things”. I know better than to rush, and yet…

I’m still the person who opens the oven door for a quick peek when I know perfectly well this will sink my soufflé.