Right on Time
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Robert Frost
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost
My husband was late to our wedding. It didn’t augur well for our future time-critical interactions, but I was in love and cheerfully ignored any detail which might be a cause for unexpected friction down the yellow brick road of happiness. We were married in St. George at the temple my pioneer ancestors had helped erect in the harsh and barren terrain Brigham Young had sent them to cultivate and conquer.
My husband and his best man had stayed the night before the nuptials at a local motel. As they were pulling out of the parking lot, my husband spotted a twenty-four hour Chinese buffet across the street. Over the protests of his best man and former missionary companion, he argued a little food was just the thing to quell the wedding jitters. My husband loaded his plate with half a dozen items on the menu that looked tasty. It was six o’clock in the morning.
Across town, my extended family was sitting in the chapel waiting for his arrival. The room was packed. Though my family hadn’t lived in the area since I was five years old, my parents were both from long-time Southern Nevada families, and we had literally hundreds of relatives in the area. They all turned out to see if that “Leavitt” boy’s daughter had turned out better than the “hell-raisers” local gossip predicted when he was young.
I was sitting with my parents and assorted grandparents on the front row. It was very quiet. For a very long time. Behind me, relatives were looking over their shoulders every time the chapel doors squeaked open, but no groom. I had grown up on military time which meant my family was always at least 15 minutes early. My husband did finally show up—almost a ½ hour late. It was a very long 45 minutes. I smiled in relief. Once we were married, I would fix that “late” thing.
After we had three or four kids, we planned to drive down to my parents’ house in Albuquerque with my sister and her new husband who were college students at BYU. I packed clothes, snacks, games, and baby equipment and was waiting in the car when our travel companions pulled into the driveway. My husband was in the garage. He’d looked at the paraphernalia necessary for a family our size and decided the laws of physics made it impossible to load both the stuff and the children in the car. We needed top carrier. He was welding one together when my sister showed up. We left about 4 hours late—with a perfectly reasonable facsimile of a luggage carrier strapped to the roof. My sister was able to persuade me not to insert my husband under the tarp atop the luggage and rope holding it together.
Church was another issue. I felt that reverence and respect required us to show up a few minutes early. My husband, however, was more of a “what-clock?” disciple. If he looked up from the Sunday paper and noticed it was time for church, he headed to the he bedroom to put on his Sunday clothes. My eight children and I waited on the couch—hair combed, shoes found, scriptures in hand. Then we all trailed into church 20 minutes late. Since our family made up a good part of the congregation, this caused some amount of disruption.
Eventually, I made a deal with my husband. The kids and I would walk to church and save him a seat on the end of the pew nearest the door. His late arrival would be less conspicuous. That worked very effectively, except for the couple of years he was the Sunday School President and had to conduct the morning meeting–then I just set the clocks ahead half-an-hour. Although, I admit, it is true that when the time changed every six months, I had to consult Son #1 (who was 6- or 7-years old) about the math involved in that project.
The breaking point of our disagreement about time came the day his old college roommate was visiting from California. On a lark, they decided to make a day-trip out of town. I was nine months pregnant. Of course, I went into labor. No cell phones back in those days. Our old Volkswagen van was parked at the top of a little hill by our house because the battery was dying, and we hadn’t had the money to buy a new one. So, our routine was for one of us to give it just enough of a push for it to start rolling down the hill; the driver would then jam it into gear and jump start it.
I waited around for a couple of hours. No husband. I’d had enough babies to know that if I didn’t get to the hospital soon, I might be delivering on the couch—a situation I wasn’t sure the couch or the baby might survive. So, I found a babysitter, grabbed my hospital go-bag, pushed the bus enough to get it rolling, jumped into the driver’s side, and hit the gears. The old bus looked over its shoulder for my husband. Seeing no one, it sighed, turned over, and ignoring my panting at contractions five minutes apart, carried me to the hospital in plenty of time.
When I checked in, the nurse said, “Is your husband outside?”
“No,” I said. “He’s in Wendover. He’ll be along.”
And he was. Just in time to see the baby arrive.
Was I mad? Yep. But when I thought about it, I acknowledged our love had given us that beautiful little boy. At least he’d been on time for that!